Contributors

July

In the first two weeks or so of this month, your webmaster continued reformatting sections of the site, finishing architecture and illustration (except for parts of Phiz that Phillip Allingham is taken in hand), and the reformatting also involves exchanging our diamond-shaped design for various sitemaps (homepages) with lists that are easier to read on smart phones. Landow renamed the originally homepage for the site oldindex.html and included a link in the new one for those readers who prefer to use the old one whose design emphasizes that all the topics in the various icons constitute the idea or work of the author or artist in the center.

John Salmon joins us a contributing photographer. Jacqueline Banerjee and he teamed up to create photo-essays on the exterior and interior of William Butterfield’s St Mary Magdalene, Enfield. This has marvellous north and south wall-paintings by Nathaniel Westlake and stained glass by Heaton, Butler and Bayne, much of it, like the beautiful east window, by Butterfield himself, but including also James Clark's memorial window based on his famous World War I painting, The Great Sacrifice. This led to a biography of Clark and the inclusion of more of his works, like the touching Blind Mary (many thanks to Hartlepool Art Gallery's Charlotte Taylor for all her help). She also wrote an essay on the Victorian's restoration work on Westminster Abbey. She has started a Twitter account for our website, too! Please follow us on it, and add some replies!

In the first week of July 1496 documents and images were uploaded to the site, bringing the number of them to 84,127 as the Victorian Web shrunk by 17 as the reformatting continues.

June

June began and continued very much the way May had gone — with your webmaster reformatting, reconfiguring, and updating the HTML documents in our architecture section. By the middle of the month he had completed the folder containing Gothic revival architecture in Poland and by the 25th completed architecture.

Simon Cooke continues his work on Simeon Solomon, scanning more than a dozen of his illustrations of the Old Testament to which has added commentaries.

Tim Willasey-Wilsey's contributions this month include Edward Richardson’s Memorial for General Sir Robert Dick containing a biography of its subject and William Salter’s portrait of Dick. He also continues his work on the buildings of British India with Col. J. L. Caldwell and Captain De Havilland’s Madras Cathedral and “An exhalation from the earth” — his photo essay on Watson’s Hotel in Bombay. His work also includes Sir Francis Chantrey's monument to Bishop Heber in St. Georges Cathedral.

Ivo de Galan, a first-time contributor, shared with us an image of the manuscript of George Whyte-Melville's “A Child in the nursery crying” — a rare Crimean War poem — and an introduction to it. Later in the month he contributed images of two drawings in his collection, Sir Hubert von Herkomer’s charcoal portrait, Edwin Lord Weeks and
Sir John Everett Millais’s Cows in a Field, a study for Millais's frontispiece to Trollope’s Orley Farm. Another new contributor, Tony Schwab, has sent us “A Bad Trip: The Trouble with Martin Chuzzlewit,” which contains a particularly interesting discussion of the way critics have distorted the character of Mark Tapley, because he is too good for their tastes.

Thanks to Arn Dekker for correcting the transcription of a name on one of Bowcher's medals.

By the twenty-ninth the site had 84,144 documents and images. As we winnow unneeded thumbnail images, we have uploaded 2781 documents — almost all re-formatted html with a view older images whose perspective distortions required fixing — but the site has only grown by a few documents in the past month!

Working with Philip V. Allingham, Landow created a section for C. E. Brock with 30 illustrations of Dickens's Christmas Books: Our contributing editor from Canada provided scans of the plates and information about them and Landow then resized them, adjusted color and contrast, created a final version of an index for Brock. As time permits, Allingham will add his usual documents containing the text illustrated, detailed commentaries, and comparisons with work by other illustrators of the same works. On the 12th he completed the first if them, Brock's frontispiece for A Christmas Carol — He had been Tim's blood horse all the way from church. More to come!

Allingham, who is about to become an emeritus member of the faculty at Lakeland University, leave Ontario, and return to Vancouver, has not slowed the rate of his contributions even while packing books and moving house! Over the past three weeks he has also contributed 100 image scans of Charles Green's wonderful illustrations of works by Dickens. Thus far he has also completed almost all the commentaries and sets of comparative images for the 31 plates in The Chimes.

Jacqueline Banrejee created a new section on John Raphael Roderigues Brandon, which includes four buildings and an extensive biographical introduction. She also added Sir John Belcher’s Colchester Town Hall and Victoria Tower, Essex (1897), which replaced Brandon and Blore’s 1845 structure. Turning to photography, she created a long overdue section on Lewis Carroll, which includes a dozen photographs and her incisive commentaries. She also formatted and added illustrations to Joe Pilling's review of Edward Wakeling's Lewis Carroll: The Man and His Circle. and Ingrid Hanson's review of Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation, the latter kindly shared with us by the online jpurnal, Cercles.

He also photographed the outsides of two important Anglo-Catholic (or High Church) churches — St. Barnabas Pimlico and the nearby sister-church St. Mary the Virgin (also known as St. Mary's Bourne Street). Returning on a Saturday morning when Mr. John Boshier, the friendly and informative guide at St. Barnabas, opened it to visitors, Landow created a series on the church's interior, including its mosaics and stained glass.

Philip V. Allingham has added Charles Green’s illustrations of Dickens’s The Chimes and begun to enlarge the section on Charles Pears as well.

Tom Ward kindly shared the introduction and discussion of indexing The Girl's Own Paper from his website.

Thanks to Melissa Shields Jenkins, Assistant Professor of English
at Wake Forest University, for pointing to an error in the book review section.

Continuing to prune the site of unneeded thumbnails and footer icons, it still grows, though more slowly, and now has 83,561 documents and images as of the twenty-seventh.

March 2015

or the first week of March, your webmaster found himself occupied with — no, consumed by — a major project: creating a web version of Charlotte Gere's Victorian Jewelry, a particular challenge because so much relevant visual material in modern museums and Victorian publications has recently become available and deserves to be linked to this important text. By the 14th this valuable resource that links to everything on the site from railways (gold earrings were made of miniature locomotives!) to Egptomania saw completion.

Offers to reconfigure the Victorian Web (for a substantial fee) pour in several times a week, but when Chris Reynolds wrote from the UK with suggestions that we should modify our formatting easier to read on iPhones and other smart phones and tablets, he offered some important suggestions, one of which we have begun to implement — replacing our image-based icons with text-based navigation tiles, two of which you'll find at the bottom of this page. This approach, which obviates the need to create an image for each icon, has the further advantages of allowing us to provide them for authors, artists, and topics that have too few associated documents to warrant creating the oler images while also avoiding annoying variations in color and tone of the image-based footer icons. One problem we haven't solved yet: getting your webmaster's beloved Oxford font to work on our servers. Take a look at one group of documents for which this time-consuming conversion has been completed.

On March 30th, the site had 83,390 documents and images — a net loss of 14 of them since dozens of unneeded thumbnail images and footer icons have been discarded as we convert to text-based navigation tiles.

Joe Leggiero shared a photograph of his stained glass Head of a Prophet supposedly created by Heaton, Butler and Bayne. Please contact the webmaster if you have any information on this piece.

The first international conference on "George Meredith and his Circle: International Communities and Literary Networks" is being hosted at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln, UK, on 24-25 July, and organisers Dr Claudia Capancioni and Dr Alice Crossley have put out a call for papers. The keynote speaker will be the eminent Victorianist Professor Sally Shuttleworth of the University of Oxford, and there will be a chance to visit the archives of the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln. Anyone interested in attending should contact meredithconference@bishopg.ac.uk.

Nearer home, many thanks to Joe Pilling for a review of Andrew Roberts' Salisbury, Victorian Titan, putting the focus for a change on Queen Victoria's longest-serving Prime Minister. Then, at the very end of the month, JB was invited to the Guildhall Art Gallery's fabulous new rehang of its Victorian paintings. Very many thanks to Julia Dudkiewicz, Principal Curator for the rehang, and Sonia Solicari, returning Principal Curator, for taking me round and talking so knowledgeably about the paintings, and for giving the Victorian Web permission to put the collection up on our website — a formidable task. Examples so far are George Dunlop Leslie's light-filled Sun and Moon Flowers; A. E. Mulready's poignant Remembering Joys that Have Passed Away; and Thomas Faed's equally moving Forgiven.

Many thanks to Paul Crowther, Professor and Chair in Philosophy, National University of Ireland Galway, the National Gallery of Slovenia, and the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway, for permitting us to put up the entire catalogue of the Awakening Beauty exhibition, which includes more than one hundred works by Victorian painters. Thanks, too, to Dr. Katherine Miller Webber for creating the web version.

New Victorian Web Reviews: Kelsey L. Bennet has some good comments on the new edition of Juli Wosk's Breaking Frame: Technology, Art, and Design in the Nineteenth Century, and Ellen Moody has strong words about Nora Gilbert's Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship.

As of the nineteenth the site had 82,537 documents and images.

December 2014

he last month of the year began with your webmaster creating a web version of Richard Redgrave and Samuel Redgrave’s chapter on the Pre-Raphaelites. After meeting with the Director of the Brown University Libraries and the head of its digital scholarship group, he learned that only a single one of their projects relates to Victorian matters, but the enormous Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection includes, among many other things, hundreds of nineteenth-century images. Drawing upon this treasure trove of images, he began a sections in visual arts on the army in British India and the Boer War as well as adding to older material on the Crimean War. Turning to the Internet Archive again, GPL found the watercolors of the Boer War by Mortimer Menpes — an artist best known for his association with Whistler and the revival of etching and engraving — and from these he chose 47 to add to the site as well as the artist’s reminiscences people he encounted in Southern Africa, including Cecil Rhodes, Arthur Conan Doyle, Winston Churchill, and Lord Roberts, the Commander-in-Chief. (Thanks to both Jacqueline Banerjee and Tim Willasey-Wilsey for assistance deciphering text on some of the thirty-five watercolors and lithographs added to the site.

The recent commemorations of well-remembered World War I demand that we also look back to the all-but-forgotten Boer War, which prepared for aspects of 1914 much as the Spanish Civil War did World War II. As a proof-of-concept project intended to show how the Victorian Web adds value to material available online, your webmaster has created an amplified, enriched web-version of Arthur Conan Doyle's a detailed history of the causes, events, and consequences of the South African conflict. Readers will encounter his text illustrated by (1) the watercolors of Mortimer Menpes, an artist usually remembered for his work in the Whistler circle, (2) British and German images of battles, and (3) many photographs of Boer leaders, army units, civilian life, and troops in action. Taken together, this Boer War project offers contrasting views of the events, though both sides agree about the gallantry of those they fought.

Philip V. Allingham continued his Dickens illustrators project, adding image scans, texts of passages illustrated, critical commentary, and images for comparison with other artists for twenty examples of James Mahoney’s visualizations of Oliver Twist, to which he added comparative works by Harry Furness, Sol Eytinge, and George Cruikshank.

November 2014

ovember began with your webmaster's “Yet another Romance of the Archive: a review of Nigel Daly's The Lost Pre-Raphaelite: The Secret Life and Loves of Robert Bateman.” Landow then came across the Atlantic to give a brief talk at Google London, and since he was already there he attended five major exhibitions — those on Constable at the V&A, Moroni at the Royal Academy, Morris at the National Portrait Gallery, Rembrandt at the National Gallery, and Turner at Tate Britain). Upon his return he reviewed Kelsey L. Bennett’s Principle and Propensity: Experience and Religion in the Nineteenth-Century British and American Bildungsroman (2014).

Andrzej Diniejko's biography of Annie Besant traces the fascinating arcs of this important woman's life — her movement through evangelical and tractarian belief to freethinking, atheism, and theosophy on the one hand, and through social activitism, campaigns for women's rights and birth control, to socialism, and freemasonary, and Indian independence on the other.

Antoine Capet, FRHists, Professor Emeritus of British Studies at the University of Rouen has reviewed Rosalind Blakesley's The Arts and Crafts Movement and Elizabeth Cumming's: Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland.

Thanks to “SilverTiger” for pointing out with remarkable graciousness a twice-repeated paragraph in the essay on Waterhouse's Lloyds Bank. Thanks, too, to Greg Bird for pointing out a typo.

Next, created Victorian Web versions of the 100 chapters of Trollope's The Way We Live Now and its 40 illustrations. The plan is to integrate it with VW commentaries on specific passages the novel and James Kincaid's book on Trollope.

Philip Allingham has recently edited a special issue of The Dickens Magazine that contains sixteen essays, three by him and one by Jackie Banerjee. He also
continued working on his Oliver Twist illustrations project, part of which included adding his scans of 28 plates by James Mahoney and a similar number by Harry Furniss.

Jacqueline Banerjee, having completed her series of photo essays on the architecture of Strawberry Hill, began work on the building's stained glass, creating seven essays containing three dozen photographs. Next, she provided essays on George Stephenson's Kilsby Tunnel, his life and birthplace at Wylam, Northumberland, and probably the oldest surviving train station in the world -- at Wylam. Another wonderful old Victorian station came next, Tynemouth, also in Northumberland, and two bridges: more work on Baron Armstrong's Swing Bridge on the Tyne, and a new piece on Robert Stevenson's High Level Bridge there, both great engineering feats for their times, and part of the sensational vista of central Tyne crossings at Newcastle.

Mia Ridge, doctoral student in digital humanities at the Open University, sent along new information about Margaret Giles's Boy on a Tortoise. Thanks to Simon Montgomery for correcting the names of the painter and engraver of a portrait of Sir Walter Scott, and thanks to Casey Ward for spotting a spelling error. Graham Dry writes from Munich to correct information about a Leighton binding.

While vacationing in Nova Scotia, GPL came upon two interesting examples of Gothic Revival churches, the tiny wood Community Church in North Grand Pré and L'Église Sainte-Marie at Church Point, perhaps the largest wooden church in America. A visit to the Acadian Village in West Pubnico, Nova Scotia — Le Village historique acadien de la Nouvelle-Écosse — produced a series of photographs that you can find in “The blacksmith at work: making nails by hand” — one of the documents in the section on human-powered technology.

Philip V. Allingham added R. Knight's illustrations for Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, a project which involved reconfiguring the Hardy main page and adding photographs associated with places in the novel. He next began a project involving visual material related to Oliver Twist, contributing images and in-depth commentaries thirty plates by Felix Darley, including thirteen from Scenes and Characters from Dickens (1888). Next, he began to write commentaries for the original 24 Cruikshank illustrations.

After returning on a trip to Newcastle that produced hundreds of photographs, Jacqueline Banerjee sent in Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones's drawing King's Daughters, which she added to the review by Joe Pilling, who has become a regular contributor, of Judith Flanders's A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin. She also reviewed Catriona Blaker's book on E. W. Pugin in Kent. Next, came a half dozen documents with stained glass by Clayton & Bell for St Peter's Church, Hersham, Surrey. She then added photos of sculpture by John Graham Lough, a difficult procedure that required removing distracting backgrounds from the images, which included his The Infant Lyrist Taming Cerberus, Cupid and Psyche,
Boy Giving Water to a Dolphin, and
Sabrina.

JB's other work this month included a new essay on Marochetti's first great equestrian statue, of Emmanuele Filiberto in Turin. She was helped here by Caroline Hedengren-Dillon, who herself contributed Marochetti's medallion portrait of his daughter Giovanna. Many thanks for that. Then JB sent in Vital Dubray's similarly iconic equestrian statue of Napoleon, in Rouen. Closer to home was Christ Church, East Greenwich by two architects of interest, John Brown and Robert Kerr. Finally, we opened a new section to bring together work on that quintessential Victorian, Samuel Smiles.

Katherine Miller Weber, who's importing and formatting documents and images into the Victorian Web, has completed her first two documents — Jonathan Smith's review of George Levine's Darwin the Writer and Patrick C. Fleming's review of Juliet John's Dickens and Mass Culture. In the following days she added two dozen more.

Valeria Aleksandrova writes that she has translated one of our docs on early locomotives into Swedish, and Kate Bondareva e-mails from Germany that she's translated into French our directions for contributors.

Thanks to a reader who wishes to remain anonymous for sending us the correct full name of the sister of the architect Walter Granville, editor of his autobiography — Paulina Katinka Eliza Bozzi Granville, and thanks also to Gerry Newby for pointing out an incorrect image and to Joanna Penglase of Australia for letting us know that one of our off-site links no longer works.

On the twenty-eighth the site had 78,573 documents and images.

June 2014

n the first day of the new month, your webmaster completed the web-version of the third chapter of Marjorie Stone's book on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a week or so later completed the entire book, after which he
reviewed of Stephen J. May's Voyage of the Slave Ship: J. M. W. Turner's Masterpiece in Historical Context (2014). Creating web versions of parts of the Fine Art Society catalogue, Architects for a New Age, added to sections on the architect William Wilkins, Charles Barry, and Philip Hardwick and also created a new one for E. W. Godwin. After photographing Joseph Durham's The Rowers in a private collection, Landow added to the materials on the sculptor. Using new software — 3DRT Setup Utility Lisboa v.1.4.8.— he created a qtvr images of several sculptures whose rotation readers can control. These include the Durham, Thomas Brock's Frederick, Lord Leighton, and Frederick James Halnon's Peace.

After a trip to Ottawa for the opening of the Gustave Doré: Master of Imagination at the National Gallery of Canada, Landow reviewed this eye-opening exhibition and its excellent catalogue. As the month ended, he reviewed Terry Deary's Dangerous Days on the Victorian Railways: A history of the terrors and the torments,
the dirt, diseases and deaths suffered by our ancestors.

Jacqueline Banerjee finished her work on Pugin at the very end of last month with two of the preparatory drawings for the Houses of Parliament, went on to format Joe Pilling's review (see below) with two sets of selected passages about Archbishop Benson's extraordinary wife Mary Benson and her "unequal marriage" (these last with help from GPL!), and next turned to R. R. Goulden's touching memorial for the social reformer and feminist Margaret MacDonald in Lincoln's Inn Fields. She also added pictures of the original interiors of Leighton House to modern photographs of it, giving some contemporary views of the artist's home.

Joe Pilling reviewed Rodney Bolt's As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil: The Impossible Life of Mary Benson.

Thanks to James Heffernan, founder and editor-in-chief of
Review 19 for generously sharing the reviews on his site with readers of the Victorian Web. The first one on our site is Laurence Davies's brilliant review of Jonathan H. Grossman's Charles Dickens's Networks: Public Transportation and the Novel. Over the next few days, Landow put up six reviews of books about Dickens, three about Trollope, two on Tennyson, and two dozen on more general subjects plus several each in other sections of the site, such as Genre, Gender Matters, Technology, and Social and Political History.

Visits to the National Science Museum produced images of three pioneering locomotives, Puffing Billy — “the oldest surviving locomotive in the world,” Robert Stephenson's Rocket — “the first modern steam locomotive,” and Stephenson and Joseph Locke's Columbine.

Philip V. Allingham began or continued several major projects, the first of which concerns Edward Dalziel's illustrations of Dickens's Christmas stories. Second, he began a section of reactions to the Crimean War in periodicals ranging from The Illustrated London News to Punch. In addition, he added two of John Leech's important political cartoons with extensive commentary — Substance and Shadow and Capital and Labour.

Jacqueline Banerjee created a new section in architecture on the remarkable Sarah Losh (1785-1853), which includes a biography and photo-essay on St Mary's Church, Wreay. Thanks to Bob Morgan for sharing his photographs with us. Since then she has been working on the sculpture of Baron Marochetti, adding his effigies of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria at Frogmore Mausoleum, a drawing of the missing angel for Bellini's tomb in Paris, a medallion of his wife Camille, and a bas-relief portrait of his sons. Many thanks to Caroline Hedengren-Dillon for her photographs of these last three. JB has also translated from the French a fascinating article by Caroline Hedengren-Dillon on Baron Marochetti's insertion of portraits of his family his bas relief, "The Meal at Simon's House" in the Church of the Madeleine"

Andrzej Diniejko reviewed Chris R. Vanden Bossche 's Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832-1867. Later in the month attended a conference in Warsaw titled: Wiktorianie nad Tamizą i nad Wisłą (Victorians on the Thames and Vistula) and enjoyed it immensely. The two-day conference, which attracted both Polish Studies and British Studies scholars, was devoted to reflection on various forms of presence of the works of Victorian writers and Victorianism as a model of culture in Polish cultural awareness and in the Polish literature of the second half of the nineteenth century and later periods.

David Trestini asks an interesting question about a decade-old undergraduate commentary about a poem by Christina Rossetti. Here's my response.

A bit of fluff: Drama TV sends us their survey of "The most haunting characters in adaptations of Victorian Fiction in Drama, Cinema, and Television" in which Miss Havisham tops the list.

Many thanks to Albert Hickson of Peterborough for sending in multiple suggestions and corrections of materials in the sculpture section. Thanks, too, to Ashley Faulkner for correcting a real howler — a misattribution of Tract 80. Later in the month Kathleen Diana Ravenhill Schoch pointed out some mistranscriptions of the signatures of her great-great-grandfather, Leonard Raven Hill.

Since arriving in London, your webmaster has photographed the remains of the exterior and interior of St Saviour's Church, Walton Place in Kightbridge, most of which has been converted to a theatre and other uses. Many thanks to Ms. Janine Gillion, who generously explained the history and recent conversion of the church. Visits to the Victoria & Albert, which included enjoying its major exhibition of post-WWII Italian fashion and the wonderful new architecture and glass galleries, produced photographs of J. E. Boehm's Eurydice and John Graham Lough's Puck.

Philip V. Allingham, who is off again lecturing on Dickens in Poland, created a series of a dozen illustrated essays on Sol Eytinge's illustrations for Dickens's Uncommercial Traveller and Additional Christmas Stories.
He and Andrzej Diniejko together reviewed Joseph P. Jordan's Dickens Novels as Verse.

Following her essay on St John's Church, Kolkata, and some of its monuments, Jacqueline Banerjee's main work this month has been a two-part piece on the Prince of Wales's tour of India in 1875-76, which brought out many good qualities in the future king. She then spent some time formatting and illustrating very welcome reviews: another by Antoine Capet, of a Millais exhibition at the Tate, and one by Ellen Moody of Simon Heffer's High Minds. Many thanks to both contributors. The next review was her own, of the splendid catalogue of the William Burges exhibition in Cork, Searching for the New Jerusalem. Then she put up and wrote about some lovely photographs of North Wales contributed by Bob Morgan, for which we opened a new section in our "Places" section. These started with Llandudno Pier, the longest pier in Wales. She added an essay to these pieces on Dinorwic Quarry and the Quarrymen's Lives.

Simon Cooke added illustrations by Hugh Thomson to his new section on the artist-designer.

Joe Pilling wrote a detailed review of Jane Ridley's Bertie: A Life of Edward VII that JB formatted, adding links and images.

The French-language magazine, Cycles, asked for and received permission to use one of our images.

Thanks to Jonathan Miller for correcting a typo and also pointing out that one refers to the famous residences near Piccadilly as “Albany” and not “the Albany.”

As of the twenty-eighth the site had 76,785 documents and images.

March 2014

fter reviewing the Ottawa Ruskin show and its catalogue last month, your webmaster received permission from the Ashmolean Museum, the University of Oxford, and the Ruskin Foundation at Lancaster University to add images in the catalogue of that show and another at the Watts Gallery to our site. As a result, we have been able to replace some older monochrome reproductions of Ruskin's drawings and watercolors with excellent color images and also to add several dozen new works. In addition, the site now has seventeen daguerreotypes either by Ruskin or in his collection. Continuing with things Ruskinian, Landow reviewed Robert Brownell's Marriage of Inconvenience: John Ruskin, Effie Gray, John Everett Millais and the surprising truth about the most notorious marriage of the nineteenth century.

He also created a section on Byzantine architecture drawing upon Bannister Fletcher and Ruskin, and later in the month he created a similar section on Romanesque architecture and the Romanesque revival. Next, turning to illustrations, Landow drew upon the Hathi Trust digital library to add 79 of Sir Edwin Landseer's drawings and watercolors reproduced in a twelve-part article in the 1875 Art-Journal, after which, drawing upon his personal library, he added thirty-four of David and William Bell Scott's illustrations for Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

After John Rowe send along photographs of what might be a study for Holman Hunt's The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple. Landow put them online with a discussion of the pros and cons of the case. On the way to Susquehanna University, where your webmaster gave two talks, he drove an hour out of the way to the superb Railway Museum of Pennsylvania, which has replicas of two early locomotives — John Steven's Steam Wagon and Stephenson's John Bull.

Philip V. Allingham completed his work on E. W. Haslehust's watercolors of Dickens-land, adding 15 of the artist's paintings to that artist's section, after which he added a dozen of F. O. C. Darley's illustrations to Dickens that included his usual combination of the text illustrated, detailed commentary, and comparative images by other artists. Next he added more than a dozen illustrations of Dickens works by A. A. Dixon, beginning with a depiction of Miss Havisham tell Pip, "It's a bride cake. Mine!" and the title-page for Great Expectations.

Thanks to John Hodges for pointing out that a link in our essay on Tower Bridge went to the wrong Brunel and to Albert Hickson for pointing out an incorrect date of Burne-Jones's Laus Veneris in a old student essay.

Last month Landow reviewed Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman, which Sony Pictures Classics had sent our editors in advance of the forthcoming movie of the same name. The film finally reached Providence, Rhode Island, at mid-month, and Landow wrote a review that examines the different ways scholarly books and cinema tell their tales.
Landow attended the opening in Ottawa at the National Gallery of Canada of Christopher Newall's important exhibition, John Ruskin Artist and Observer, and he reviewed both show and massive catalogue. Prompted by an exhibition on Gustave Doré this coming June in Ottawa, he greatly enlarged our section on the artist and illustrator.

Philip V. Allingham, having completed the enormous comparative project involving Harry Furniss's illustrations of Dickens, is now working on two projects: E. W. Haslehust's watercolors of Dickens-land and F. O. C. Darley's illustrations of Dickens fiction.

Diane Greco Josefowicz has written a substantial essay entitled “Recent Studies of Victorian Psychology and its Relation to Victorian Literature” that discusses among other things cognitive cultural studies, cognitive literary historicism, and the more general problem of understanding Victorian theories of psychology and mind and then determining to what extent they help us better understand Victorian literature.

Emma Coleman writes from the de Morgan Centre to announce an exhibition that includes a rarely-seen portrait of Pre-Raphaelite artists’ model Jane Morris.

Alexander Mirgorodskiy of Taganrog, Russia, asked for and received permission to use one of our images in his book on the attacks of the British and French on Taganrog and Azov Sea coast in the summer of 1855. Courtney Quigley,
Exhibitions and Programs Production Manager of the Chicago Botanic Garden asked for and received permission to use one of our images “for an informational panel about Orchid History.” Piret Põldver, Editor of Maurus Publishing House in Tallinn, Estonia, has received permission to translate our web version of Carlyle's “Signs of the Times.”

Thanks to Alane Lim for pointing out broken links caused by reformatting some documents, and thanks to Carl Eichenlaub for pointing out a missing document in the In Memoriam project.

Landow's major project was a twenty-fifth-anniversary web-edition of the catalogue of Alice H. R. H. Victorian Bibliomania 1987 exhibition at the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. This catalogue's six dozen entries valuably complement Simon Cooke's section on book bindings and design with its authoritative discussions of Victorian book illumination, chromolithography, and relievo bindings, all related to both the Gothic Revival and the Arts and Crafts Movement. This important exhibition includes works by Owen Jones, Henry Noel Humphreys, William Morris, Augustus Pugin, John Ruskin, and many others. Fortunately, both the Museum and some of the major lenders to the exhibition, particularly Ellen K. Morris and Edward Levin, have enthusiastically supported creating a new, much-expanded e-version of the original catalogue, which replaced many of the black-and-white illustrations with color and also much more material.

John E. S. Pankhurst has contributed a catalogue of the stained glass and church decoration by the firm of Bell & Beckham.

Zsófia Marincsák of www.sherlockian-sherlock.com, a site based in Hungary, writes to exchange links. Rory Walsh. Discovering Britain Project Officer of the
Royal Geographical Society, reqeusted and received permission to use one of our images.

Thanks to Rev. Dr. Ron Davies for correcting a caption for our photo of Budapest castle

On the thirtieth the site had 74,371 documents and images.

November 2013

Your webmaster added two works by Edith Downing illustrated in The Studio: Music and Mother and children. The Internet Archive online version of this periodical also provided images of paintings, including Albert Goodwin's The Delectable Mountains, and
Sir Edward John Poynter's The Message,
and sculpture including Sir Edgar Bertram Mackennal's Oceana.
Robert Freidus and GPL teamed up once again, adding photographs of George Tinworth's Pilgrimage of Life Fountain in Kennington Park, London,

Philip V. Allingham will be heading to Lublin, Poland, next month to give a talk at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University for PASE (the Polish Association for the Study of English). His subject will be the changing reception of Great Expectations as reflected in its Victorian illustrations.
Before heading across the Atlantic, Allingham wrote a dozen more essays on Harry Furniss's illustrations of Dickens's A Tale of Two Citiesich includes. Each essay contains an enlargeable image of the illustration, the passage it realizes, an interpretive essay, and comparisons with images of illustrations by other artists.

Nancy Glazener, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh, asked for and received permission to reproduce Beerbohm's Robert Browning, Taking Tea with the Browning Society as an illustration for her Modern Language Quarterly essay on Browning in America.

Thanks once again to Robert Bowman for sharing images and information about sculpture in his gallery's collection: William Reid Dicks's Mask of Perseus, Francis Derwent Wood's The Bather, Richard Louis Garbe's The Song of the Siren, Frederick James Halnon's Peace, and Sir William Goscombe John's Boy at Play. Thanks also for AD Antiques for sharing images and information about several tiles by the Martin Brothers, including Flower-and-leaves and Rose. The Maas Gallery contributed an image of
James Thomas Watts's A Welsh Wood in Winter.

Thanks to Anthony Pincott, Hon. Treasurer and Membership Secretary of
The Bookplate Society, who writes from London to correct James Thomas Watts's year of birth: According to FreeBMD website, “ an index of births, marriages and deaths, transcribed from official registers,” he was born in March 1850. Thanks, also, to Deena Wang '14, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for pointing out broken links in the Music and Popular Entertainment section.

Ah, the names of London pubs of which Robert Freidus sent in photographs that Landow formatted — Chelsea's The Adam and Eve, Black Lion Pub on High Kilburn Road (there are also Red and White Lion Pubs elsewhere), the Crown in Seven Dials and the Crown in Seven Dials and the Crown & Cushion on Westminster Bridge Road, the Falcon in Clapham south of the Thames and the Flask in Hampstead, way north of the Thames (saw one of the Rolling Stones there once).
How about the Hung, Drawn & Quartered Pub at Byward Street and Great Tower Street. I especially like the name of the Shooting Star.

The Internet Archive provided seven drawings by Phil May, including a self portrait,
plus a portrait of Charles Santley, the impressario and opera singer, by Thomas Cooper Gotch, who is generally known for his allegorical paintings of young girls and women.

Then, coming back to her collaboration with photographer Robert Freidus, she wrote about John Johnson's Colquhoun Mortuary Chapel at Brookwood Cemetery, and the chapels and Egyptian Catacombs at Highgate Western Cemetery. She also put together with commentaries two galleries of views (Eastern and Western, and two of monuments with angels or similar figures (Eastern and Western), for each side of this famous cemetery. Monuments considered separately were Frank Holl's, Michael Faraday's and the architect Edward Blore's. But, thanks to our busy contributing photographer, there are many more famous people's graves and unusual monuments still to come. Special thanks to Dr Ian Dungavell for contributing his photos of the interior of the Colquhoun Mortuary Chapel at Brookwood.

July 2013

Working through folders of photographs taken in London, your webmaster added London's Methodist Central Hall and the former St. Peter's Church (1866) — now St. Yeghiche's Armenian Church. Thanks to the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's for permitting GPL to photograph and put online photos of the Victorian mosaics designed by Salviati and Richmond in the Cathedral.

Philip V. Allingham contributed 4 photographs by Alfred Ellis of characters in the play based on George Du Maurier's Trilby; each photograph is accompanied by Du Maurier's original illustration, the passage the photograph represents, and an essay explaining the relation ship between images and text. Her also contributed scans and commentaries the Tauchnitz plates of Dickens and the illustrations by Harry Furniss of Cricket on the Hearth, such as Caleb Plummer — The Toy Maker. Allingham began our new section on Victorian Canada with a photo-essay on John Butler, Lieutenant-Colonel and leader of Butler's Rangers.

Alberto Landoni, a retired mathematician from a little town near Milan, Italy, requested and received permission to reproduce Jackie Banerjee's photograph of Cambridge's Church of the Holy Sepulchre in his planned book on Legnano.

Vassilaki Papanicolaou, who is finishing a doctorate
in comparative literature at University Bordeaux III, France, kindly sent in corrections for some scanning and typographical errors on the site. Many thanks, and thanks to Brian J. Goggin of Stradbally North, Castleconnell, County Limerick, Ireland, for identifying the Louisa as a horse-drawn barge

As of July 29th the site had 71,729 documents and images.

June 2013

Continuing their collaboration, your webmaster and Robert Freidus created a partial list of the works that served as prizes in the annual Art Union lottery. He also put up “Communcations Networks: Postal Service, Telegraph, LAN, and Internet” — brief selection from Catherine Golden's work. On the 12th Landow left for Germany to begin a brief 1-month Fulbright (as a Senior Specialist in Information Technology) at the University of Bayreuth. Thanks to Tamsin Williams and the Watts Gallery for sharing more than a dozen images of paintings by Frank Holl, which has enabled GPL to create a new section on the artist and announce the Gallery's coming exhibition of his work.

Jacqueline Banerjee contributed a five-part essay on Victorian orphanages that concentrates on Captain Coram and the Foundling Hospital in London but ranges widely as well. Much of the rest of the month was spent on completing her work on
Lichfield Cathedral. This included the highly decorative monument to Bishop Selwyn,
who was Bishop of New Zealand, and (exotic in another way) a monument to the controversial Major
Hodson of Hodson's Horse, who died in the 1857 Mutiny. The interior of the
Cathedral, with its splendid Scott-Skidmore screen and other
fittings, came last, with a list of "Related Material" there serving
as an index to the whole series. Other contributions included a short
essay on E. M. Barry's Charing Cross Hotel (and
some proof-reading, as usual! Please notify us of any mistakes you
spot!).

James Driscoll of Driscolls Antiques Ltd., of Clitheroe, Lancashire, kindly shared photographs of a dozen works of Victorian furniture, one of the most interesting being a burr walnut card table from the 1860s that opens in two different ways. Alison Davey of AD Antiques, of Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, has generously shared photographs and information about two dozen ceramic objects, including chargers by William de Morgan, grotesque birds, vases, and a fish by the Martin Brothers, and a range of objects manufactured by Doulton — Lambeth jugs designed by Hanna Barlow, an Art Nouveau vase designed by Eliza Simmance, and Mark Marshall's The Waning of the Honeymoon.

Jacqueline Banerjee, who reviewed Mitchell and Benford's new Yale edition of George Meredith's Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads, created a photo-essay on
T. R. Spence's St George's Church in Newcastle with the assistance of Bob Morgan, Dr Neil Moat, and the Newcastle City Library and the monument to Andrew Newton by Richard Westmacott, Senior, at Lichfield Cathedral. This was followed by stained glass at the
cathedral by John
Hardman, Charles Eamer
Kempe and William
Wailes, with short biographies of Kempe and Wailes. Other work
this month includes a piece on F. W. Woodington's splendid Rugby Union Lion at
Twickenham, and a longer life and illustrations for Kate Greenaway
(for the illustrations, see the index there). Other contributions are
about Ruskin's spring and
pump at Fulking, Sussex, and Bird, a new illustration by Helen
Allingham. She also reviewed Pamela Horn's concise but very useful Life in a Victorian Classroom.

Terence Trelawny-Gower writes inquiring about architectural sculpture in Clare College Cambridge designed by Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt and executed by Theodore Phyffers.

The SDBB (The Swiss Service Centre for Vocational Training, Study and Careers Counselling) is an Institution of the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education (EDK) requested and received permission to use an image of a student essay on Brontë.

Thanks to Richard Toporoski of Vancouver for pointing out a mistaken transcription of “GCB.” as “CCB.”

By May 27th, the site had 70, 313 documents and images.

April 2013

The month began with your webmaster back in London, expecting a balmy spring but encountering cold, strong breezes, and, yes, snow. Before leaving home, he put online 10 of William Nicholson's fine portraits of Queen Victoria and other notables, which Paul Liss of liss Fine Art shared with readers of the Victorian Web. Thanks, Paul! Thanks, too, to Chris Blanchett, a tile historian, who explained that tiles in G. E. Street's Roman church attributed to William Morris are actually by Frederick Garrard. He also contributed a glossary of ceramics terms, a biography of Garrard, discussion of his styles, list of works, and photographs of 46 other tiles by Garrard, which led to your webmaster's creating a homepage for tiles and for Gerrard. While out
exploring the area north of Old Brompton Road, Landow came upon a William Butterfield gem — the Church of St. Augustine Queens Gate. See the new sections on the exterior, interior, tile paintings of Old and New Testament events, and the church's post-Victorian stained glass.

March 2013

This month your webmaster contributed a review of two works of Neo-Victorian fiction that provide continuations of novels by Dickens and Eliot: Charles Barry's Mr. Micawber Down Under (2011) and Imke Thormählen's The Laidislaw Case (2011). Then, working with photographs and research by Robert Freidus, and valuable assistance from Jacqueline Banerjee, he created sections containing hundreds of images for the following cemeteries and their monument and mausoleums: Abney Park,
Beckenham,
Hampstead,
Hillingdon,
Hither Green,
Nunhead, and
S. Ealing.

Philip V. Allingham continued his major illustration project, posting images and extensive commentary for the British Household Edition of The Unfortunate Traveller by E. G. Dalziel and the American version by C. S. Reinhart. He has also nearly completed the commentaries for Marcus Stone's eight Illustrated Library Edition illustrations for A Child's History of England, a series undoubtedly sanctioned by Dickens himself. In
consequence, issues as various as Dickens's attitudes towards historical figures in English and French history such as Joan of Arc and Lady Jane Grey, as well as to "The Burgers of Calais," almshouses, Victorian theatres, ship-building, Mormon emigration, and mailboats have been connected with Dickens's non-fiction published in the 1850s and 1860s.

Diane Greco Josefowicz added an introduction and new material to her bibliography of primary sources on Victorian theories of biology and gender.

Simon Cooke, who continues to explain our already large section on illustration, contributed a biographical introductions for Thomas Morten and John Pettie plus examples of their work.

Thanks to Liselot Quisquater from the University of Ghent for notifying us about a bad link, which turned out to be a document that had gone missing. Your webmaster located it and put it in its proper location. Thanks, too, to Katja Rachinsky, who wrote from Germany to correct a typo in the date of one of Alexander Bain's works, and to Thomas Sawyer from Irvine, California for proof-reading our essay on London Society and providing an important date.

As of the 25th, the site had 68,432 document and images.

February 2013

Your webmaster began the month editing and formatting the work of two new contributors on large projects. First, he worked with Michael Kersting's 40 photographs of Pugin's churches and chapels in County Wexford, Ireland. A much larger project involved creating with Clare Sargent a hypermedia assemblage comprising the history of St. Peter's College, Radley, its predecessor institution, St Columba’s College, Stackallan, Ireland, and the founders, patrons, staff, and a students of the English High Church boarding school — all of which provides the context for Ms. Sargent's edition (on this site) of Robert Singleton's diaries. Next, using volumes available online from the Internet Archive and his own library, GPL added steel engraved versions of works by J. D. Harding, Samuel Prout, and J. W. M. Turner from Jenning's 1833 Landscape Annual and the 1830 edition of Roger's Italy. The last half of the month was spent translating Elizabeth K. Helsinger's Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder into html and linking it to materials both within and without our Ruskin section.

Philip V. Allingham completed the commentaries on E. A. Abbey's American Household Edition illustrations for
The Christmas Books and Christmas Stories, after which he began work on commentaries for Edward Dalziel's British Household Edition illustrations of The Uncommercial Traveller, complementing earlier commentaries on C. S. Reinhart's illustrations for a similar anthology in the Harper and Brothers' Household Edition. The acquisition of the full set of Furniss's 1915 edition of the works of Charles Dickens (courtesy of Professor Emeritus Jim Gellert of Lakehead University's English Department) prompted him to update the commentaries for a number of Furniss's illustrations for Great Expectations, including his complicated title-page vignette for that volume. All told, he's done about 30 essays during the last two months.

This month, the Pugin Society asked if they could link to us, and
the BBC history website requested our help on the topic of crime and
crime fiction in the Victorian period. Peter Silk wrote to request permission to use one of Bob Freidus's photos for a Royal Mail commemorative sheet celebrating the life and work of the Australian sculptor Bertram Mackennal.

Alison Hemmings of the Caledonian Club's magazine asked for and received permission to use an image of St. Paul's.

Thanks to Matthew T. Howells for writing in with additional information about Church of St, James the Great on Cardiff.

Jane Freeman writes to point out a typo in Charlotte Brontë's penname. John Sankey, a regular contributor, corrects a few dates in the list of Athenæum members. Thanks!

As of the 25th, the site had 67,677 document and images.

January 2013

The year began with 66, 789 documents and images on the Victorian Web, 4,500 sites linked to us, and all of 101 people follow us on on the VW Facebook page.

Philip V. Allingham completed the last of his twenty-eight essays comparing individual illustrations by Edward A. Abbey to both the texts they realize and other artist's illustrations of the same passages.He has begun a similar series on the Dickens illustrations of Harry Furniss.

Jaqueline Banerjee began the month with a biography of the sculptor R. J. Wyatt and a photographs of his monument to the Smith Family in St Mary the Virgin Church, Merton Park, a church about which she contributed a photo-essay discussing both its origin form, Victorian additions, monuments, and stained glass window by Burne-Jones and Morris, including Moses and Abraham, Isaiah and David, St Mary and St John, and . Other materials associated with this church include Nathaniel Hitch and Henry Philip Burke Downing's war monument in the churchyard. She also added a photo-essay on Silvester Charles Capes's commercial building at 14-16 Cowcross Street in Islington. (The Financial Times requested and received permission to quote from one of her contributions.)

Some extra pictures of Chantrey's Bishop Heber in St Paul's
Cathedral in Kolkata took us back to India again, and prompted
John Sankey to send in a new contribution about Thomas Brock's young Queen
Victoria in the Victoria Memorial Hall there. Many thanks!!

The De Morgan Centre, which has sent along a notice of their forthcoming exhibition, The Lost Paintings of Evelyn De Morgan (1 February to 20 April), has also kindly shared several images of the artist's work, including St. Christina Giving her Father’s Jewels to the Poor.

Dennis McCue, Senior Information Officer, Glasgow City Council, kindly sent along a photograph of George Frampton's monument for Queen Victoria as exhibited at the 1901 International Exhibition in Glasgow, which now accompanies photographs of the statue in Calcutta by Ramnath Subbaraman, Robert Freidus, and Simon Stock.

Michael Curl writes to inform us that the old link to Trollope's Apollo: A Guide to Classics in the Barsetshire Novels of Anthony Trollope no longer works and to one that does. Thanks! Thanks and apologies are due to Denise Betteridge whose e-mail from last July pointing out the disappearance of an image just surfaced in GPL's in-box.

Graham Lupp from Down Under sent along his photograph and accompanying text of Orton Park in New South Wales.

Greg Withnail writes from the Open University to point out a bad link created when we moved an essay to our section on children's literature. Thanks!

As of the 24th the site has 66, 595 documents and images.

November 2012

We welcome Simon Cooke as the Assistant Editor for Book Illustration and Design. Most appropriately, he contributed more material to his section on the illustrator Alfred Walter Bayes (1831-1909) and a much-needed essay on German illustrators and Victorian England. These new additions to our section on illustration prompted your webmaster to add to the materials on Laurence Housman, the brother of the poet who was a fine illustrator, poet, playwright, and author of both realist and fantasy fiction. The Internet Archive provided 60 examples of his illustrations for his own and other writer's works and two of his designs for bindings, and his autobiography, The Unexpected Year proved a treasure drove of information about his relation with his more famous brother, his reminiscences of Wilde and Whistler, the history of his religious belief, the harmful effects of Victorian prudery, and his movement from a political and social conservative to a radical who campaigned for female suffrage.

Jacqueline Banerjee's contributions in the first half of the month included photographs of, and commentaries on, Sir Francis Chantrey's famous and touching Sleeping Children and his figure of Bishop Ryder, both from Lichfield Cathedral, and a photo-essay on the architect Basil Champneys' contributions to Manchester Cathedral. Her recent trip to Manchester also yielded an illustrated essay on Edward Salomons' fine Reform Club there. She completed her short series on the interior of the Midland Grand Hotel at St. Pancras with a look at the Grand Staircase and the atrium there, then turned to a private residence: The Heights in Witley, Surrey, designed for Sir Henry Cole by his son. It later became the home of George Eliot. Many thanks to Sarah Worthington for suggesting this piece, and also for her photographs and added information. Collaboration is always welcome!

As of the 27th the site has grown to 65, 882 documents and images — and this after deleting dozens of small thumbnails no longer necessary when most readers have faster Internet access.

October 2012

Your webmaster continued working with both his photographs of Oxford colleges and material available in the Internet Archive, creating a new homepage for Oxford that now includes 23 colleges plus a section on individual churches and streets. Part of this project includes a review of J. Mordaunt Crook's Brasenose: The Biography of an Oxford College. Doing a little housekeeping, your master added photographs and images that had been waiting patiently for many months, including works in cast iron, such as a finial with mer children (mermaid babies) surmounted by gilded crown, an ornate cast-iron lamppost in Trafalgar Square with cherubs and griffins, and a glass-and-iron porch roof with a cast bad relief of a dog. Thanks to the Athenæum Club we have a portrait of Sir Walter Scott, the formatting of which led to creating a new art relations section for the novelist. August's visit to London also produced a photograph of Westmacott's statue that surmounts the Duke of York's Column on Carlton Terrace.

The section on the Victoria and Albert Museum, which tripled in size, now includes pictures of the the columns and façade of the Henry Cole wing before and after restoration, the Costume Gallery and larger images and details of the altar screen visible from the entrance hall, examples of damage to the façade caused by air pollution, and the museums usually hidden iron and glass roof that protects a dropped ceiling over the galleries. Several of the older photographs have been replaced by better ones, many details have been added as well. The Internet archive provides images of proposed works by the architect, W. D. Caroë and wallpaper by Walter Crane.

Derek B. Scott, our music editor from Leeds, sends in performances of three more Victorian parlor ballads, including "Love’s Old Sweet Song" (which appears in Molly Bloom’s monologue in James Joyce’s Ulysses) plus "It was a Dream" and "Goodbye!"

Jacqueline Banerjee contributed "Border Crossings" a review of Claudia Nelson's Precocious Children & Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature, after which she continued her work on the art and architecture of Birmingham with some wonderful photographs (and accompanying texts) of Burne-Jones stained glass in St. Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham: the
Nativity,
CrucifixionAscension, and
Last Judgment.

Shifting her focus from Birmingham to Manchester, she has begun a series on photo-essays on Waterhouse's designs for the University of Manchester, beginning with the Waterhouse Quad and Rear Courtyard and university buildings facing Oxford Road. Thanks to Stephen Richards for contributing his excellent photographs. Joining Landow and Freidus on the London cemetery project, she carrie dout a great deal of research to produce “A Victorian Partnership: Aickin & Capes” She also sent in some sculpture photos and commentaries, on Richard Cockle Lucas's Dr Johnson statue in Lichfield; Percy Fitzgerald's biography and his Boswell statue in the same town, as well as his statue of Dr Johnson in London; and Sir Richard Westmacott's monument to Nelson in Birmingham's Bull Ring, this last piece accompanying a lovely photograph provided by Dr Craig Thornber. She rounded off the month with an essay on Victorian Listed Buildings," prompting your hard-working webmaster to make links to it from the many, many splendid listed buildings in our architecture section.

Phillip V. Allingham has completed several months' work on the illustrations of Dickens's five Christmas books (including Christmas Carol)

Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems helpfully sends along a few corrections of typos in the Ruskin section. Dorothy Fuldheim pointed out a dead offsite link. P. Brown corrects the identification of a building in Newcastle. Thanks!

Bernard F. Dukore, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Virginia Tech, writes to announce the publication of his new book Bernard Shaw: Slaves of Duty and Tricks of the Governing Class, by ELT Press (available on Amazon).

A week in England produced several hundred photographs of the University of Oxford — yes, that's the proper name of the university — including series on the following colleges: Balliol, Brasenose, Christ Church, Keble, Magdalen, and St. John's. A walk with Robert Freidus through Hampstead Heath produced a much-expanded section on that green space. In addition to the architecture of William Butterfield's Keble College, the site now contains his mosaics in the chapel. Before heading to Oxford Landow completed the basic Legal London section by adding Gray's Inn (with Pomeroy's statue of Francis Bacon) to earlier work on Lincoln's Inn and the Middle and Inner Temples. Exploring the area around Gray's Inn, your webmaster peeked in an alley and caught sight of a massive church tower, which turned out to be Butterfield's Church of St Alban the Martyr, a church almost entire hidden by the buildings surrounding it.
More photographs to come!

Philip Allingham continues his series of extensive commentaries on Fred Barnard excellent illustrations for Dickens's Christmas Books; he includes each plate, provides an analysis, and adds comparisons to illustrations of the same scene by other artists. Examples of such comparisons appear in illustrations for A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth .

Jacqueline Banerjee opened a new section on the architect Basil Champneys, providing a biographical introduction and two essays on the John Rylands Library with two dozen photos. She also created a biographical introduction for the Manchester sculptor John Cassidy, who did the sculpture at the Rylands and added more illustrations by the architects Edmund Blore and Thomas Allom.

Katharine Chandler, Reference Librarian in the Rare Book Room of the Free Library of Philadelphia, writes to say that her institution owns the original watercolor of Sir Samuel Luke Fildes's tribute to Dickens — The Empty Chair.

ERA Publishing House writes from Bulgaria wanting permission to use our illustrations for a translation of Dickens.

Many thanks to Anthony Pace, Superintendent of Cultural Heritage, Malta, for writing in about the misattribution of a church our Maltese section — and for introducing us, in the process, to another fine Maltese architect of the Victorian period. The correction and new information will be up very shortly.

The site has 63,912 documents and images as of the twenty-seventh.

July 2012

In response to students who write to ask if the materials on the site are vetted by referees, GPL explained the ways six categories of materials are accepted. He also finished creating our web version of Derek B. Scott's
The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlor and found some photographs of Venice's St. Mark's and the Ducal Palace dating back to 1966. In addition, he scanned and formatted 21 charcoal drawings and relevant text from F. Hopkinson Smith's In Thackeray's London (1916), a volume that includes interesting material on both the novelist himself and the settings of Pendennis and other works..

Caroline Hedregen-Dillon sent in a photograph of Baron Marochetti's tender La Bimba Dormiente(Sleeping Girl), very kindly providing an English summary of her recent essay on it in La Tribune de l'Art. Thank you so much!

Jacqueline Banerjee, who's also been traveling on the continent this month, has created several photo essays on work by A. W. N. Pugin and his son Edward W. Pugin: (1) St Wilfrid's Church, Hulme, Manchester, an essay graced by more than a dozen of her photographs plus those of Pugin's stained-glass; (2) St Peter the Apostle's Church, Woolwich and associated buildings (exterior; interior); (3)
Thanks to Catriona Blaker of the Pugin Society for her welcome assistance. JB also created a section on William Wilkinson Wardell, an architect who worked with Pugin, and the tomb with recumbent effigy of Canon Richard North that the architect's son designed and which William Farmer carved.

Vlad Brown, who requested and received permission to translate the introduction to the Victorian Web into Ukrainian, has put the translation on his site.

Thanks: to Peter Jackson for correcting a name in Kipling's biography; to Jacqueline Burrows for correcting an error in Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott;" to Philip Hart for telling us about another in the notes to In Memoriam, section 1;
to Dorothy Fuldheim for pointing out that an off-site link no longer worked and suggesting a replacement.

As of the 25th, the site has 63,355 documents and images.

May 2012

Robert Freidus, our contributing photographer and an expert on funerary sculpture, sent along a DVD containing 1108 images a documents about grave markers, sculpture, tombs, mausoleums, and chapels in London cemeteries, which enabled your webmaster to create a homepage for mausoleums and others thus far for the Brompton, City of London,
Golders Green, Nunhead, and
Putney Vale Cemeteries. Jacqueline Banerjee wrote an introduction and history for Brompton.

Next came an account of Greenwich, from the point of view of a Victorian enthusiast, with its splendid buildings containing (for example) a splendid Franklin Memorial, busts of Admirals Keats and Hardy, and a beautiful Victorian seashore painting — one of James Clarke Hook's "Hookscapes." She also wrote a photo-essay on the famous clipper ship, the Cutty Sark. Finally came an essay on Brompton Cemetery, to contribute to the most recent of your webmaster's fruitful collaborations with photographer Robert Freidus (see above).

Montserrat Martínez García translated into Spanish the top level link lists for gender matters, and María M. Bautista did the same for 20 documents containing images of William de Morgan's ceramics.

Cambridge University Press would like to alert us to a recent initiative. It's collaborating with Cambridge University Library and other partner libraries to reissue a whole range of out-of-copyright works "of enduring scholarly value." The books are crisply and legibly printed, and would often be of special interest to our readers. For example, already available is the monumental "Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin." More information at the
Cambridge Library Collection minisite, or the Cambridge Library Collection blog.

Thanks to Cameron Norman, who reported a broken link in the list of comments about characterization in Great Expectations.

As of the 28th, the site has 62,877 documents and images.

April 2012

On April 1st (no fooling), the Victorian Web joined Facebook, and within the first few days we hd 30 likes — nice, but considering that we have more than 4,000 sites linking to us, we hope for a lot more. Check in on Facebook for announcements of new material and suggestions about what to check out.

The Thames project continued with with addition of 23 lithographs by T.R. Way and 43 watercolors by Mortimer Menpes, an artist who began as one of Whistler's disciples. In addition, the graphics section grew with four dozen plates from the Halls's Thee Book of the Thames from its Rise to its Fall (1859) and G. A. Symington's Father Thames. Click here and take a tour of the River Thames by choosing the next button. Cityscapes in the painting section is another good place to explore.

Philip V. Allingham and your webmaster continued work on the illustrations for both the American and British Household Editions of Dickens's works, this month adding images by Phiz from the British version and extensive commentaries (including comparisons with earlier individual illustrations by Phiz himself and other illustrators, such as Thomas Nast) for another 35 plates. Thomas Nast's 52 illustrations also went online.

Pleased with our review of their new biography of Prince Albert, I. B. Tauris publishers would like us to announce the addition to their catalogue of reissues of Lytton Strachey's biographies, Queen Victoria and Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History, both highly readable and now with illustrations. They write: "I.B.Tauris are endeavoring to bring books by this famous writer of the late Victorian age back onto the market and back in the spotlight." A worthy aim, especially as inspection copies reveal that the reissues are well-produced, with additional illustrations.

H.W. Ellis writes from Australia, "I was searching for the line 'but it's thank you Mr Atkins...' and your site came up and I must compliment you on the content. I believe the Mr Tommy Atkins came from the use of Tommy Atkins as the sample name in "How to fill in your pay book" which is also why British soldiers are called Tommy." Wikipedia's article on the BriBritish Army suggests that this is a likely explanation. Thanks!

Dr. Melisa Klimaszewski of Drake University writes to point out that documents in the Neovictorian section on Carey's Jack Maggs do not appear at the end of links. Turns out a single missing ">" produced a blank page. Easily fixed. Whew! Thanks, Melissa! Malcolm McKee points out an historical error in one of our articles written in 1988. Time to fix it!

Andrzej Diniejko created a section on Olive Schreiner including a life and works and a discussion of The Story of an African Farm just in tome for the Victorian Web to provide an appripiate place for Liz Stanley's announcement of the University of Edinburgh's Olive Schreiner Letters Online project.

Thanks to Beth Lawrence for suggesting that we add Elisha Otis and his invhention of the elevator safety brake (1853) to the technology timeline. Correction by John Yeadonz

As of the 26th, the site had 61,584 documents and images.

February 2012

This month saw a several large collaborative projects go online, the first set of which contributes to the many commemorations of the bicentennial of Dickens's Birth on 7 February 1812. Philip V. Allingam has created "2012: Events Marking the Bicentennial" to put in one place the announcements we have received and events he has attended. We're doing our part with Philip Allingam and Jacqueline Banerjee's's photographs of Rochester and othrer Dickens-related places, and your webmaster has formatted more of Montserrat Martínez García's translations of the site's biographical materials for Dickens. Andrzej Diniejko contributed “Charles Dickens as Social Commentator and Critic,» which discusses Oliver Twist, through Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit.

Like the Rochester page in Dickens, that on London's Tower Bridge
epitomizes the Victorian Web, since five people including early twentieth-century artists and photographers provided images and several people added text and captions. Equally important, it shows how we can take separate bits of data, such as images from the Internet Archive and the photo library's night picture and add them to Barry's text, cresting somethinng unique that uniquely connects various disciplines.

Thanks to Kimberly Blaker of New Boston Fine and Rare Books for sharing an album dating from the 1870s that contains more than fifty photographs of Oxford and Cambridge. Formatting documents for them and creating new homepages for each university occupied a few pleasant days. Drawing once again upon Internet Archive version of The Studio, GPL next added 16 drawings of the two universities by Vernon Howe Bailey plus 8 studies by Herbert James Draper for Prospero Summoning Nymphs and Deities and a photograph of the artist in his studio. Various issues of The Studio also provided additional drawings by Bailey of London, 10 watercolors of Italy, Scotland, and England by Sir Edward Poynter, and 20 watercolors and drawings Eleanor, Fortescue-Brickdale and a half dozen paintings by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer. When Logan wrote in to inquire about Charlotte Young, your webmaster discovered he had never connected her homepage to our list of authors and as part of doing so added more links, chiefly to works by Jacqueline Banerjee. Internet Archive version of The Art Journal provided Walter Crane's stained-glass designs and Byam Shaw's painting Notice Neptune, though . . . illustrating Browning's “My last Duchess.”

Having completed his commentaries on the 43 illustrations of Pickwick Papers by Seymour and Phiz, Philip V. Allingam, who has been busy at Dickens conferences and celebrations in England and France, began scanning the images and writing commentaries for Sol Eytinge's 18 plates.

Noelia Malla García sent in her Spanish translations of more than 20 essays in the Wilde section, and GPL formatted, linked, and put them online along with Ana Abril Hernández's translations of the fifth chapter of Kincaid's Tennyson's Major Poems, Laura Masides's translations of the section on Felicia Hemans, and Montserrat Martínez García's biographical materials for Dickens.

Robert Ehrlich kindly wrote to identify the painter Thomas Langdon whom Ruskin mentions in the Hunt-Ruskin correspondence, which I first published in 1977.

Philip V. Allingam has almost completed his large project of providing all the illustrations by Phiz and Robert Seymour for Dickens's Pickwick Papers. The project involves rescanning the images at higher resolution, adding scans of details, adding the texts illustrated, and writing extensive commentaries for each of the 43 plates. In addition PVA has begun to provide plates by other illustrators, such as the American Thomas Nast and even Phiz's own new versions of old subjects.

Finally, she suggested incorporating the complete text of Paul Waterhouse's 1897 entry in the Dictionary of National Biography on Sir Gilbert Scott, helping your webmaster adapt this valuable biography. It now includes links to his many works on our site and 20 photographs, making it much easier for us to grasp the scale of his achievement. One should point out in passing that these added links and illustrations exemplify how the Victorian Web versions of documents, which situate them within a network of meaningful connections, differ from those on the still-invaluable
Internet Archive, which presents them as easily accessible isolated books. To take one example: the original text of the Dictionary of National Biography biography of the great architect mentions that he was a descendant of the “commentator Scott,” but few twenty-first-century readers will understand that Waterhouse refers to the enormously popular author of biblical commentaries found in many family Bibles throughout nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States. Perhaps more than anyone else, this ancestor of the architect taught Victorians of many denominations how to interpret the Bible.

Before leaving for India JB also did a considerable amount of proof-reading, a boring but essential chore when our website is expanding so rapidly. Readers' amendments are warmly welcomed and credited!

Paul of CBS Radio Mystery Theater site sent along links to the old radio versions of works by Conan Doyle, Dickens, Stevenson, Stoker, and Wilde.

Thanks to Anthea Lang for identifying the architects who added the spire to Pugin's St. Mary's Cathedral in Newcastle, and thanks, too, to Ana Mitric for correcting a broken link and to Desmond A.C. Reid for both correcting the title of David McGill's sculpture of St. Sebastian and sending along a photograph of the bronze version now “Kilmarnock, in the
Dick Institute.” Bill Burns e-mailed to correct a next link. Thanks!

Thanks to Mark Perlman for correcting a typo in one of the DuMaurier documemts!

Béatrice Laurent of l'Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, writes to invite readers of the Victorian Web to submit papers for a seminar entitled “Sleeping Beauties in Victorian Britain: cultural, artistic and literary explorations of a myth” at the 11th conference of the European Society for the Study of English, Instanbul, Turkey (September 4-8, 2012).

Gurpreet Gill, Coordinator for Course Materials at DeVry's Online Services, requested and received permission to link to our introduction to Herbert Spencer. Of course, one doesn't need permission to link to any document on a public website that is not password protected, but the courtesy of letting us know about the link is much appreciated.

Thanks to Jonathan Ford, Secretary of the Athenæum Club, for generously sharing John Kenworthy-Browne's “A Temple of British Worthies: The Historic Portrait Busts in the Athenæum,” with readers of the Victorian Web and for granting permission to photograph and put online the Club and its sculpture. During a stay at the Athenæum, your webmaster photographed Thorvaldsen's Psyche, the Club's copy of the Belvedere Apollo, and various rooms, all of which produced a new homepage for the Athenæum and a photograph gallery. The web version of Kenworthy-Browne's “A Temple of British Worthies” contains an introductory essay, a section on the tradition of library busts, a discussion of making plaster casts as an essential part of the nineteenth-century sculptor's work, a catalogue of the library busts, and photographs of other busts at the Club plus documents, such as selections form the Minutes of the General Committee.

During the first two days of your webmaster's brief stay in England, when the Athenæum was full, the Reform Club nearby kindly provided a room and permission to photograph some of their sculpture. Thanks to Michael McKerchar, Club Secretary, for permission to photograph and include on our site busts by Matthew Noble (Cobden, Cromwell, and Palmerston) and John Acton-Adams (Gladstone and Brougham, and John Bright).

Thanks to Mark Preston for pointing out incorrect captions on the Albert Memorial friezes.

On the 30th the site had 57, 901 documents and images.

September 2011

This month opens with welcoming
Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology at the University of Leeds as our new Victorian Web Music Editor.

Your webmaster is back in London where he took advantage of some lovely sunny days to photograph a dozen portraits on the façade of the Foreign Office by Henry Armstead or J. Birnie Philip and Frederick Thomas's series of eight great portraitists on the north-facing façade of National Portrait Gallery plus his portraits of Macaulay, Carlyle, and Stanhope over the entrance. He also contributed photographs for Sir Francis Chantrey's George IV and both the main statue and details of Boehm's Carlyle.
In addition he added the following buildings to the architecture section:
The Prince of Wales public house,
Philip Webb's 35, Glebe Place, Chelsea home and studio for the painter George Boyce, John Lowe's 50 Glebe Place, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's only building in London.

During OpenHOuse London on the weekend of 17-18 September, when the usually inaccessible Foreign Office welcomes vimositors, GPL photographed much of the sculpture there, thus expanding the section he and Jacquekline Banerjee began some years back. First to go online are images of more than two dozen busts by Hugues Protat in the Durbar Court of those men who created and governed British India. Thanks to Hannah Talbot, Press and Communications Officer of St. Paul's Cathedral, and the Dean and Chapter, GPL obtained permission to photograph its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sculpture and mosaics. Thus far complete and online: more than two dozen monuments in the aisles and crypt as well as a new section of Alfred Stevens's great Wellington Monument with both more sculpture and the Cathedral's Victorian mosaics to come.

Thanks to Molly Farrow and Vicki Carroll who e-mailed that the entire history section had disappeared! It's all due to what I'd call a too sticky touchpad: while moving my finger past the history folder while uploading new documents, I inadvertently moved the history section inside another one. It's easy to fix, fortunately, but really scary until one discovers where it moved this time. Thanks also to Denise A. Barnett to pointing out a problem with a document.

She also wrote and illustrated an essay on the Bradford Wool Exchange to which GPL contributed a brief discussion of the Exchange's relation to Ruskin's “Traffic.” With the co-operation of the Natural History Society of Northumbria, JB then added an essay on the work of the botanist Margaret Rebecca Dickinson. One of her pictures of George Gilbert Scott's King's College Chapel in London was featured (with permission) on the front cover of the programme book for the Society of Biblical Literature's International Meeting at King's this month.

Andrzej Diniejko contributed an introduction to the life and works of W. E. Henley. While vacationing with his family in the Polish countryside he's searching for examples of the Gothic Revival and nineteenth-century iron-and-glass architecture for VW.

Dr. Pascal Debout of the Faculté de Droit, Université de Strasbourg, has completed his French translation of the third chapter of Landow's Past Masters Ruskin: Ruskin l'interprète de la société.

Christina Beardsley writes to provide links to the preface, introduction, and second chapter of her biography of the liberal Churchman Frederick W. Robertson; they have been added to the Robertson sitemap (homepage).

As of the 25th, the site had 55,260 documents and images.

June 2011

Your webmaster began the month by arriving in Rijeka, Croatia, where he's spending three weeks as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Information Technology. While being shown around the beautiful city center by his host, Professor Marina Biti, Chair of Croatian Studies, he found analogues to British Victorian architecture in Rijeka, taking photographs of a public market to the section of iron and glass architecture and some beautiful Art Nouveau buildings on the Korzo, the main pedestrian shopping street.
A few days after his arrival he gave a lecture at the University of Rijeka about the Victorian Web, and on the 5th he flew to Eindhoven, the Netherlands, for the ACM (computer science) HT2011 conference where presented a paper entitled “Victorian Web and the Victorian Course Wiki — Comparing the Educational Effectiveness of Identical Assignments in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.”

Philip V.Allingham contributed an essay on Dickens's religious beliefs and continued his major projects on commentaries about illustrations of the novels, adding a dozen images and commentaries about Marcus Stone's for Dickens's Our Mutuual Friend plus otherts for Sol Eytinge's illustrations for A Tale of Two Cities. He also sent in material from The Illustrated News on a raneg of subjects.

Mark De Novellis, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Orleans House Gallery, Riverside, Twickenham, writes to tell us about the current exhibition of Richard Dadd's work at the gallery. Works from the Bethlem Art and History Collections Trust, West London Mental Health NHS Trust and private collections have all been brought together to chart this artist's early career, travels to Europe and the Middle East, mental illness and work created while at Bethlem and Broadmoor Hospitals. The exhibition is free, and lasts until 2 Ocober. More details on the exhibition website.

Thanks to Todd Ramsey for taking the trouble to send along the updated URLs for more than half a dozen sites listed on the “Related Resources” page.

As of the 27th, the site had 54,456 documents and images.

May 2011

The Department of English at Brown University gave a retirement dinner for your webmaster on the 11th, he submitted his last grades on the 29th, and on memorial day he said a few words to the graduating English concentrators, thereby just about closing out his 39 years at the university (retirement comes officially at the end of the academic year — June 31st).

Galina Miklosic writes from Minsk for permission, which she received, to translate our essay on Radcliffe's word-painting into Belorussian, which she then planned to post on her blog.

Penn Quinn writes to report a broken link on the Braddon sitemap. Thanks!

The site had 53,855 documents and images on the 30th of the month.

April 2011

After returning from Jyväskylä, Finland, where your webmaster gave several lectures, one about experimemts with this site, he devoted much energy to formatting material and correcting perspective and removing distracting bacgrounds from photographs by new contributors as well as continuing to mine Punch for relevant cartoons and caricatures. Drawing upon some work he had done last month, he put up five more contemporary photographs of Onslow Ford's sculpture.

Amitav Banerjee reviewed Shabrani Basu's Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of Queen's Closest Confidant, and John Sankey reviewed Penelope Curtis and Keith William's Modern British Sculpture, the catalogue for the recent exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Lauren Palmor help out by e-mailing about a few duplicate (and broken) links. Thanks!

The site had 52,981 documents and images on as of the 25th.

March 2011

Your webmaster spent six days formatting and linking Victoria Parra Ortiz's Spanish translations of the more than 130 documemts in the Swinburne section, after which he formatted two sections on Ruskin translated by Montserrat Martínez García. Continuing to mine Punch, he added a dozen cartoons to Fads and Fashions, created section on various aspects of Victorian railways and, in the Arts and Culture section, added a new subsection on The Royal Academy and other galleries and numerous cartoons to Life with the Aesthetes.
He spent the last five days of the month at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland — first at the Publishing Electronic Literature in Europe conference, where he spoke on “What Will the Scholarly Book Become in E-space — Experiments with the Victorian Web.” Afterwards he gave a public lecture, “What's Happened on the Internet since 2000? Web 2.0, Social Media, and what they have taught us,” after which he gave several talks on digital literature and culture for a graduate seminar.

Philip V. Allingham completed the plates and extensive commentaries for Fred Barnard's 25 illustrations for Dickens's Tale of Two Cities.

Malcolm Shifrin sent us an illustrated description of his site, Victorian Turkish Baths: their origin, development, and gradual decline, which appears in our sections on public health and social history. David Taylor kindly shared his illustrated essay, “The School House, Trumpington, by William Butterfield,” which JB and GPL formatted.

John Price Williams writes to provide the names of the architects who designed the extension to the building that houses the Royal Geographic Sociey.
W.D. Owen writes to ask, “Why do you give Sir George Frampton the credit for the Arthur Sullivan memorial on the Embankment in London??
Surely it was the work of Sir William Goscombe John.” Read's Victorian Sculpture says Mr. Owen's correct. Thanks!

As of the 28th, the site had 51,926 documents and images.

January 2011

The New Year began with your webmaster in a very cloudy and often rainy London — one day of sun in three weeks. A quick run from his flat off King's Road — well, a very fast wheezy walk — to Sloane Square on morning after his arrival produced a set of photographs of Holy Trinity, the famous Arts and Crafts church. Even though the sun went behind clouds and a British telecom truck partially blocked the view of Newman's statue near the Brompton Oratory, your webmaster finally obtained a decent image. Rain and clouds didn't get in the way of photographing the newly restored interior Butterfield's All Saints, Margaret Street, which complemented last year's photographs of the exterior. Perhaps the most exciting discovery of this trip was stumbling upon Joseph Durham's Striking the Rock, a bronze sculpture for which your webmaster had been searching for more than three decades!

Partly as a means of bringing our reader's attention to Chesterton's ideas, partly as a means of experimenting with what hypertextual academic criticism might become, your webmaster created a kind of collage of twenty passages from C.K. Chesterton's writing, ranging from an attack on the 1832 Reform bill as a conspiracy by landed aristocracy and manufacturers of the North to keep working people from power to sometimes brilliant, often eccentric, and always interesting comments about Carlyle, Dickens, Macaulay, Ruskin, and Trollope.

One of the loveliest parts of the visit to London was attending the Thomas Hardy Society Wreath Laying at Westminster Abbey, 2011. Thanks to Jacqueline and Amitav Banerjee for inviting us to attend with them.

Andrzej Diniejko began a new section on the genre of slum fiction with an introduction and bibliographies of primary and sceondary readings. Thanks, too, for his proof-reading work by others on the site.

The Times had some nice things to say about the Victorian Web:

"The Daily Universal Register," Web Search: Victorian Web: An outstanding resource for literature and history students, this website also makes for fascinating reading from anyone interested in matters ranging from what aspects of Victorian culture have been lost with decimalisation to how people sent letters in those days and the rhyming slang of the day. As of this month, the site has nearly 50,000 documents. www.victorianweb.org

(Tuesday December 28 2010, p.26)

Lauren Harmsen Kiehna writes from the University of Kansas to announce the 2011 Trollope Prize competition, which now has both undergraduate and graduate awards.

Dr. Kara Smith, Instructor of History at Georgia Perimeter College, writes to correct a name in the essay on Ricardo, and Carol Engelhardt Herringer,
Chair, History Department at Wright State University, writes to do the same for the essay on Pusey. David Sawicki pointed out an incorrect date in Sir Joseph Bazalgette's biography. Thanks also to Alan Day who provided a changed link to a Columbia University site!

By the 30th of January the site had 51, 285 documents and images.

December 2010

By the twenty-seventh, the site had 49,975 documents. Looking through his library, your webmaster came upon a copy of The Diary of Alfred Domett, 1872-1885 obtained in Oxforfd more than three decades ago. Domett, who was the original of Waring in Browning's “What became of Waring?” provides often fascinating material about Browning's views of his contemporaries, early knowledge of Hebrew, and his surpringingly close relationship with Tennyson. He also includes an anecdote about Tennyson's shyness and interesting information about sculptors, such as J. H. Foley, Thomas Thornycroft, and Mary Thornycroft, and the physical appearance of public figures, such as Gladstone and T. H. Huxley. He also recorded his delight with Edinburgh.

Philip V. Allingham continued work on the illustrations of Dickens by Marcus Stone and Sol Eytinge, adding 50 new plates and thus far 10 sets of captions and commentaries for Stone's Our Mutual Friend.

Jacqueline Banerjee contributed essays (illustrated with more than 30 of her photographs) about Pugin's St Augustine's Abbey Church, Ramsgate and the Grange, his home adjacent to the church. To these she added St. Marie's Grange in Wiltshire illustratedby a contemporary engraving. Catriona Blaker of the Pugin Society very kindly read these new contributions and provided corrections and new information. She also created a new section on the Arts and rafts architect Charles Harrison Townsend, including his Whitechapel Art Gallery and The Horniman Museum. In addition, JB provided new versions of works containing links to electronic texts for Hannah More and George MacDonald.

J. Michael Desmond, Professor in the School of Architecture at Louisiana State University, asked for and received permission to use the site's photograph of St. Paul's, Covent Garen, in his book on the architecture of his university.
Paul Bukhovko writes from Belarus for permisisn to translate our article “Charles Lyell” [his Belorussian translation]. Ashley Muir Bruhn of Sterling Publishing in New York asked for and received permission to reprint portions of PVA's “Some Early Dramatic Solutions to Dickens's Unfinished Mystery” in an edited volume of John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens.
Thalia Allington-Wood from the Tate requested and received GPL's photo of the bust of John Robert Cozens on the façade of Royal Institute of Painters in London. Alex, the webmaster of LivingBorough.co.uk, suggested an excange of links involving George Eliot's neighborhood.

The British Museum writes to invite our readers to a book-signing and Christmas shopping event on Thursday 2nd December in the British Museum Bookshop, from 6pm. On offer are complimentary seasonal refreshments, a discount on books on the decorative arts, a special selection of "authentic replica Victorian jewellery" and the chance to speak to the authors of a new book, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria. The latter is evidently very wide-ranging, encompassing jewellery from Europe and America, and the roles of jewellery in fashion, literature and the culture generally. Sounds promising!

Danniel Dutton writes from the UK to let us know that the old off-site links to texts by George Eliot no longer work, Thanks! Mr. Dutton's e-mail prompted GPL to replace these links with ones to Project Gutenberg e-texts, after which he did the same for a dozen other authors. By the 29nd the site had 49,466 documents.

October 2010

The month, which marks the tenth anniversary of this quasi-blog within the Victorian Web, began with your webmaster in Bucharest, where he gave a talk on the American ceramicist-sculptor, Arnie Zimmerman at a conference on real and virtual cities at a Romanian center for semiotics. While in Bucharest he photographed an interesting nineteenth-century example of iron and glass architecture — the Macca-Vilacrosse Passage, whose name, date, and architect Prof. Mariana Net kindly provided. Just after mid-month more Spanish translations arrived, were formatted, and put online.

Andrzej Diniejko traveled from Poland to Sardinia to deliver a lecture on the Victorian Web at the Convegno Italiano at the University of Sassari. Upon his return home he sent along an essay on the life and works of Frances Trollope.

Mark F. Bean writes to provide a possible explanation for the odd name Catnach.

Christ Keenan of the Edison Innovation Foundation invited us to add a link to the organization's blog, which I have done. Pauline Hernandez wrote to say that the Waterloo link to material about Sherlock Holmes no longer works and suggested another site. Oliver Penil writes to give notice of his French site that lists all those guillotined during the Terror. Paul Thompson writes, “your website won Shmoop's Best of the Web award for Bleak House.” Thanks!

As of the 18th, the site had 48,912 documents and images.

September 2010

As of the 27th, the site has 48,873 documents and images. Your now-seventy-year-old webmaster is writing from Singapore where he and Ruth have flown for the 10th-anniversary celebration of the honors program at the National University of which he was the founding dean. While recovering from jetlag, he has continued work on the French translation of the site, which now consists of 800 documents. Upon his return from Singapore on the 16th, he formatted and uploaded the sitemap for «El Catolicismo romano en la Gran Bretaña victoriana» and twenty odd essays on Victorian Roman Catholicism and anti-catholicism, which includes a chapter from Josef L. Altholz's book on the Liberal Catholic movement in England.

Philip Allingham scanned the images and wrote the text to accompany a series of 14 illustrations by Copping and the Taylors of Dickens' Dream Childrren, a volume written by the novelist's granddaughter; he also scanned the book's introductions.

Michael Uphill requested and received permission to include JB's photograph of St Mary Abbotts in his Tales from the London County Crypt — “about bellringers in London.“ Winn W. Wasson, who teaches Political Science at Ashford University in Iowa, requested and received permission material transcribed by PVA.

Christophe Semois wrote suggesting a link to his site www.Napoleon-battles.com, which features the Battle of Waterloo, and I have added it to the suggested reading that follows the biography of Wellington. Ruairidh Anderson writes from the U. K. to announce his Victorian-related blog, Songs from the Howling Sea: every Friday he releases
“a free song about a character or event from London's Old East End.” His titles include “Murder and the Medical Profession,” “Part Time Entertainers And Raw Sewage,” and “Sunshine from the East.” Hubert Groult writes from France to request a link to his Wilde site. Ed West wrote to ask for permission to use "pictures for my blog about buildings demolished in the 20th century." Christopher Rollason shared his translation of Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" with us.

Rachel Preen, Advertising Manager, Schoolzone.co.uk Ltd, wrote while GPL was in Bucharest that the site had received a star rating from Schoolzone.

Jasmine Boni Ball of the International School of Florence writes, “I came across your site the victorian web and right now im writing a paper about 'what caused an increase in child labour during the victorian times/industrial revolution' was wondering if you could possibly give me some books or websites which would helped me with my historical investigation. I find the internet it quite limited and really need some strong primary sources." Here is GPL's response.

Anna-Maria Barz writes from Germany to let us know that a link in “Tennyson's Works” was broken: when a new version of Jim Kincaid's fine book was uploaded links to it weren't changed. Thanks, Anna-Maria!

Thanks to Constance Harsh, Professor of English, Colgate University, for providing the correct identity of the towers in the background of one of Phiz's plates for Martin Chuzzlewit. Thanks also to Merryn Somerset for explaining Hardy's reference to “Fosseway” in “A Trampwoman's Tragedy.”

July 2010

Your webmaster's Ruskinian pilgrimage ended on the 2nd, and for the next few weeks he continued to work on the hundreds of photographs of French gothic cathedrals and other buildings, the interior and exterior of Chartres being the last to see completion (and the stained class yet to come). In addition to continuing to format, proof, and link the lists of Ruskin's mentions of individual cities and structures scanned from the Library Edition, he continued what has probably been his single most difficult formatting and editing project on the Victorian Web — an annotated, heavily illustrated and cross-linked online edition of The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Unfortunately, Project Gutenberg has not yet added this work, and various online versions are often dreadful: the Hathi Trust's version, for example, spells Ruskin in various ways, including “Raskin” and “Iluskiu,” “St. Lô” appears as “st l6,” and “façade” as “fa9ade,” and it omits the crucial § in hundreds of cross-references, rendering them useless, since they appear to direct the reader to pages not sections in the text.

Taking a break from The Seven Lamps project, he created an online illustrated journal of the On the Old Road V trip, which pilgrimage James L. Spates, Professor and Class of 1964 Endowed Chair of Sociology and Chair, Urban Studies Program, at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, conceived and led. The illustrated journal awaits the contributions, comments, and photographs from other members of the group, who came from France, Switzerland, England, and the United States. Oh yes, by the 26st, the site had 47,355 documents and images.

On the 30th GPL uploaded the beginnings of French version of the Victorian Web, which thus far consists only of Susana Garcia Hiernaux's translations of materials on Bram Stoker, Swinburne, and Symons plus GPL's translations of various sitemaps and more than two hundred illustrated documents in the sections on architecture (the Houses of Parliament, Norman Shaw, and Waterhouse's Natural History Museum) and sculpture (e.g., the Albert Memorial and the works of Brock and Woolner). Translators — and corrections — most welcome!

Graham Lupp is a successful Australian painter whose widely diverse artworks involve a great many interests and extensive travel overseas. Originally an architect, Graham also has a keen interest in Victorian Australian architecture, and has proposed sending along “Postcards from Oz” at irregular intervals, and he has already contributed enough material for GPL to create a section on Australian architecture (be sure to take a look at his painting of a window in the local Bishop's Victorian home.

Christian Myhre Nygaard of Jyskebank.tv, a Danish English-language online tv station, invited the Victorian Web to add a link to
Gibraltar, an English territory with southern characteristics, which we have done in British Empire sitemap.
Keither Duffy writes to let us know about the East Durham History Project to which we have added a link in the places section. Gary Crawford writes to let us know that the URL for Le Fanu Studies has changed. Thanks.

Dr Alexandrina Buchanan, Lecturer in Archive Studies at the University of Liverpool, writes in with information about the retsoration of St. Catherine's Chapel, Ely Cathedral.

Alberto Rinaldi e-mailed from Trossingen, Germany, “we have the pleasure to inform you that ‘The Victorian Webs’ has been selected as the Linksgiving.com Weekly Link Award winner for this week (July 11-17, 2010). Matthew Koyle pointed out a broken link in the index of authors, and Clare Imholtz wrote to correct an error in the introduction to the illustrator Gilbert. Thanks!

June 2010

In preparation for a voyage to France with fellow Ruskinians — the fifth version or stage of On the Old Road conceived and led by James L. Spates, Class of 1964 Endowed Chair of Professor of Sociology at Hobart and William Smith College — your webmaster scanned twelve plates from The Seven Lamps of Architecture, creating larger scanned images for individual parts of multi-section plates and adding the passages in which Ruskin discusses them. Whenever the Victorian Web had other relevant drawings and watercolors, GPL linked them to these plates as well. During the two-week Ruskin pilgrimage, he took more than a 1,000 photographs of buildings Ruskin described in Bayeux, Caen, Chartres, Coutance, Lisieux, Rouen, and St. Lô. Jim Spates, Cynthia Gamble, Pierre André Mentent, and Norma Wilson identified the architectural details Ruskin drew and about which he wrote. Standing before the buildings Ruskin escribed, Jim read from Ruskin's published writings, letters, and diaries, and Cynthia informed many of our excursions with cutting-edge scholarship by reading from her extensive transcriptions of unpublished manuscript materials. The site now contains photographs of the present condition of the detail at St. Lô to which Ruskin devoted Plate II as well as a better preserved analogue. Similarly, we now have an image of the original window tracery at Bayeux Cathedral that appears in Plate III and what he called the "foam bubbles" in the Plate VII.

The non-Ruskinian discoveries included buildings in Caen that resemble those Samuel Prout drew in Lisieux and a reconstruction (on the grounds of William the Conqueror's castle) of a medieval derrick used in stone quarries (for the technology section). This discovery prompted GPL to rewrite the discussion of ages of technology originally written in 1988, renaming it “Five Ages of Technology.”

Thanks to Alice Horne for correcting a misspelled name in the section on Great Expectations and to Marc B. Goldstein for correcting a real howler in “The Lady of Shalott.” Andy Wood, Hon. Secretary, Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, corrected the birthdate of Alfred East, explaining “I am reliably informed that even during Sir Alfred's lifetime the date was often wrongly given.”

May 2010

Glorious May continues with site having grown to 46,355 documents. Drawing upon M'Clintock and Strong's nineteenth-century Evangelical Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature — the ten volumes of which David Cody, a researcher who worked on the original Intermedia project, gave him two decades ago — your webmaster added susbtantial materials to the religion section, including a ten-part essay on John Wesley, substantial discussions of George Whitefield, Socinus, and Socinianism, and three substantial essays on tracts and the tract movement. After Ohio University Press granted permission for the Victorian Web to translate into html its online PDFs of the introduction and first chapter of Megan A. Norcia's fascinating X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790-1895 (2010) your webmaster spent several days scanning, modifying, and formatting the many, many endnotes for the VW version.

After Catherine J. Golden, author of Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (2009), met with GPL to discuss ways of creating a section in the Victorian Web on the subject of her book, which will link to social history, gender matters, economics, technology, and politics, he retitled the section on printing as “Printing, publishing, letter writing, and the beginnings of telecommunications” and put up a new sitemap for Victorian letters as a social and tecnological practice to which Professor Golden contributed an introduction. GPL next devoted most of a week to formatting the materials, particularly the Victorian ones, in Eunice and Ron Shanahan's “Letters from the Past,” separating the letters and commentaries into sections containing for Victorian and earlier letters.

Adrian Lipscomb, who earlier provided our biography of the military painter, William Simpson, provided materials to open a new section on portrait miniatures and one of its practitioners, Maria Eliza [Burt] Simpson, which includes almost a dozen of her works, a biographical essay, and photographs of the artist.

March 2010

Perhaps the most important news of the month was the request from the Library of Congress on 29 March to archive the Victorian Web for its historical importance.
As of 29 March, the site had 45, 795 documents and images. Your webmaster redesigned and reformatted James Kincaid's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, and continuing work on the Spanish vesion of the site, formatted the materials on Emily Brontë, Catherine Hubback, and A. C. Benson. The first stages of the Great Expectations project saw completion: this experiment in collaborative scholarship and learning with web-based texts will link (1) the text of the novel, (2) previously published scholarly texts, encluding entire books, (3) dozens of illustrations, (4) contemporary reviews, and (5) student-created annotations that take various forms, including essays and reading and discussion questions. This web version of the novel derives from the Project Gutenberg EBook version that “An Anonymous Volunteer” and David Widger created. Thus far the text, several dozen illustrations, and a few dozen student commentaries are online.

Lucia Hernandez writes from “Hampstead Theatre about Andersen's English (7 April-8 May 2010), a play that presents an important moment in Hans Christian Andersen’s relation with Charles Dickens. It is a haunting and wistfully funny new play about family secrets, loneliness and love.”

Don LePan, President of Broadview Press (which publishes out so many wonderfully annotated editions of Victorian works, wrote to say that the title of Robert Buchanan's “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti” had a typo — “Fleshy” instead of “Fleshly”
One Tim [tradcliffe2@gmail.com] wrote to inform us that the link to "Maxwell on Molecules" from the chemistry page didn't work — thanks for that! — and that "the entire chemistry section is very limited. These issues, he advised, "should be immediately addressed as is your civic duty." It's always nice to hear from the young.

February 2010

By the twenty-second the site had 45, 403 documents and images.
Continuing to work on the Spanish version of the site, your webmaster has thus far translated and uploaded 1,100 documents — a number really not all that impressive once one realizes that they all appear in sections on architecture, decorative arts, and illustration and thus contain comparatively little text! The long-planned recreation of The “In Memoriam” Project on the web has seen the first stage completed: all 133 sections of the poem have been formatted and linked to lists of almost every appearance of 20 images, symbols, and motifs, such as “ dream,” “hand,” “time” and “widow” (when words repeat within a lne or two, they are not linked). Recreating The “In Memoriam” Web, which Jon Lanestedt of the University of Oslo and GPL published in 1992 with Eastgate Systems, presents major problems on the WWW, since it lacks several key features of Eastgate's Storyspace, among them (1) the ability to create and overlay many small annotation windows, and (2) invisible links that readers can easily locate by pressing a key combination. Of course, using Java and other software, one could replicate some of these features, but the WWW's lack of standardization means that the resulting documents will not function in most web browsers. Stay tuned.

Philip V. Allingham has brought up to 37 the extensive commentaries for Phiz's illustrations of David Copperfield.

Drew Gibbons writes from snowy Virginia (!) that "the information under your 'how to cite' section is in need of updating. The MLA 7th ed., now in force, has made a number of changes, and the site is not reflecting them." As soon I can make it to the library, I shall up date the directions.
Christopher Wieninger writes to let us know that Chris Redmon's Sherlockian site has moved to http://www.sherlockian.net/. Ashley McConnell writes to correct the assertion that Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts "the first woman to be given a peerage," so I have added "Victorian" before "first woman."

Etienne Ma of Brown University pointed out two bad links in the sitemap entitled "The Social Contexts of Charles Dickens Writing," one it turns out created by reformatting E. D. H. Johnson's Charles Dickens: An Introduction to His Novels, the other by standardizing the names of sitemaps — once again, editing the site seems to involve two steps forward and one back. Thanks to all.

Amy Brennan of the Scottish government's Culture, External Affairs and Tourism Directorate, wrote for and received permission to use one of Dr. Banerjee's photographs of a statue of Robert Burns. Dr. Andy Reid wrote for and also received permissin to use JB's photograph of the Viceroy's Lodge in Shimla, India, in a book on the "Tudoresque Diaspora."

V. Peidis kindly e-mailed to say that the one of our documents in the Feist collection of photographs had the wrong image and that the link in the gallery of statues of Queen Victoria did not work. Nathalie Chernoff of the University of Lancaster wrote let us know about a bad link. Kathy Webber wrote to correct a typo in Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar." Many thanks.

As of the 31st, the site had 44, 873 documents.

December 2009

Your webmaster continued working on the Spanish version of the site, creating 60 odd documents about Victorian architecture in the Straits Colonies and a larger number on iron-and-glass architecture and buildings in London. When Brian Gross, who's promoting The Young Victoria, wrote to announce this film, that he tells us "your readers would love," GPL created a document with links to the elegant official movie site and images from it. This month the Victorian Web received essays from new contributors in the UK, Poland, and Iran, and GPL began working with the authors to prepare their work for the site.

The site, which had 43,995 documents and images as of the 28th, passed 44,000 by the year's (and decade's) end, after I uploaded essays by the three editors and Andrzej Diniejko.

November 2009

Your webmaster continued working on the Spanish version of the site, and with the help of Ana González-Rivas Fernández, Assistant Professor at Madrid's Universidad Complutense (who also provided the first Spanish translator's bio), he put up more material from the sculpture section. He also worked with various contributors creating or editing htmls, and he reforamtted several hundred documents about book illustration, in the process creating a small section on German book illustration. Professor López-Varela vetterd and then e-mailed Terri Ochiagha Plaza's translations of the materials on Thomas Hughes, and GPL devoted a day to formatting them, which are our first complete section in Spanish on an author.

Philip Allingham completed commentaries for the first dozen illustrations by Phiz of David Copperfield plus all the plates, which GPL color corrected and sized.

Simon Cooke added to his work about British illustrators with essays on Richard Doyle and William Small, and he provided scans of illustrations by them as well as some by Daniel Maclise and Arthur Hughes. GPL sized and edited the images and created htmls for all of them.

October 2009

After your webmaster returned from delivering a series of lectures on new media, hypertext, and their educational and political effects at Universität Bayreuth, Germany, he began laying the groundwork for Spanish and French versions of the site that will be part of a three-year project entitled "Studies on Intermediality as Intercultural Mediation." This project has been conceived, organized, and directed by Professor Asuncion López-Varela Azcarte of the Facultad de Filologia de Universidad Complutense de Madrid and supported by grants from her university and from Madrid (Comunidad de Madrid CCG08-UCM/HUM-3851) and the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación MICINN FFI2008-05388/FISO).. After each lexia (or separate document) is translated, two readers will vet it, after which it will appear in the non-English versions of the Victorian Web. Landow created icons once Alfonso Sánchez Moya and Maya Zalbidea Paniagua corrected his suggestions for icons texts. Using Google Translate, he created a draft of a Spanish version of the section containing 34 works of Thomas Woolner, the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor, which Ms. Zalbidea Paniagua then corrected, herself translating the documents on Raffles and John Stuart Mill — the first Spanish text documents to go online! Next, he translated two dozen documents for the Albert Memorial plus the works of Joseph Durham and those of
Edward Hodges Baily, best known for his statue on Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square.

Dr. Albrecht Geck, Privatdozent at the University of Osnabrück, writes to say that his book, Autorität und Glaube (Authority and Faith), in which a Victorian Web image of Tom Tower, Oxford, appears has just been published by Universitätverlag Osnabrück. Dr. Kurt Harris
Chair, English Department, Southern Utah University, writes to let us know that he has created a Thackeray site.

Bruce Bumbalough, Watauga, Texasm writes to point out a broken link in the general bibliography section, and Shelley B. Aley, Associate Professor at
James Madison University, writes to point out that one of our contributors used a portrait of the wrong Alexander Bain. Thanks.

After packing up and moving to Gower Street next to UCL, your webmaster created photographs and accompanying htmls for Sir Richard Westmacott's Duke of Bedford memorial and one of his favorite London buildings — the Arts and Crafts classic Mary Ward House, named after Matthew Arnold's famous novelist-niece and the first school with classrooms for disabled children. A visit to the V&A furnished information about the relations of Art Nouveau and dance, and photographs of Dalou's Bacchanal, a better version of Watts's Clytie, Drury's The Age of Innocence, and two fairy paintings by Joseph Severn and one by Etty. Taking a tour of Buckingham Palace permitted GPL to photograph the rear of the palace, back garden (really lawn), and the lake and create a sitemap for the palace, and while there he was able to take some additional pictures of the magnificent Victoria Memorial. Going to the Saturday food market near London Bridge produced photographs of the Globe Tavern, a 1872 pub, and the iron and glass markets, and walking to that a Spitalfield's Charles Harrison Townsend's Bishopsgate Institute. Walking around central London produced photographs of Sir Francis Chantrey's William Pitt in Hanover Square, statues of Science, Commerce, and Art on 70-71 New Bond Street. The section on iron-and-glass architecture and that on railway stations continues to expand with photographs of the entrance to the old Metropolitan Railway, Liverpool Street and Waterloo Stations (thanks to station reception for granting a photography pass).

When OpenHouse London 2009, which took place on the weekend of the 19th and 20th, permitted access to buildings not usually open to visitors, GPL took a series of photographs of some important churches: A visit to G. E. Street's St. Mary Magdalene in Paddington produced many images of the church, its sculpture, Salviati's mosaics, Holiday's stained glass, and J. N. Comper's Chapel of the Holy Sepulcher with its magnificent reredos and organ. A visit to E. B. Lamb's Parish Church of St. Martin (which Pevsner described as London's "craziest Victorian church") produced another large series. Another series of images made possible by OpenHouse London was Norman Shaw's Hampstead home and studio for Kate Greenaway. Walking from Belsize Park to Primrose Hill to Bloomsbury led to photographs of the Sir Cowasjee Jehangir Fountain in Regent's Park, and a quick ride on the tube to Oxford Circus produced the last series from this trip — an essay and a dozen images about Butterfield's All Saints, Margaret Street — he (almost) hidden treasure. This illustrated essay represents a new approach to putting large numbers of images about a single building or sculpture online: instead of creating an html for every image with approximately the same essay, it uses thumbnails linked to larger images rather than to htmls containing images. Will readers prefer it? Will the smaller number of html documents make it harder to find on Google, Bing, and other search engines?

More photos of stained glass and mosaics to come. . .

Philip V. Allingham and GPL completed the series of 28 illustrations by Fred Barnard for Dickens's biography in the Household Edition. PVA is at work on commentaries.

David Humphreys, who writes, "when I teach the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy, I use your image of Pygmalian(sic) and Galatea," kindly corrected the spelling in Gérome's painting to "Pygmalion." Normand Theriault e-mailed to let us know that the image of Tennyson's family tree had gone missing, and GPL replaced the corrupted image.
Thanks. On 28 September the site has 42, 551 documents.

Michael Philips, who wrote to inform us that he "produce[s] video guides of buildings and landmarks for www.iGuidez.com," invited us to link to his 120 videos of Belfast, such as this one for Lavery's Pub. Henry Reichold writes to inform readers of the Victorian Web about his detailed view of the Albert Memorial.

Ruth Howard, Curator, Vale and Downland Museum, writes for permission to use Dicky Doyle's The Battle of Ashdown that serves as an illustration in Tom Hughes's The Scouring of the White Horse. Magnús Einarsson write from Iceland for permission to use Tenniel's illustrations for the Alice books in "a sociology textbook" he is writing "for students in secondary school." (Some others also wrote for permission, which was denied, to use our materials for commercial purposes, in large part because we do not want the Victorian Web to compete with for-profit sources of images.

A young man named Todd wrote to "thank you for your Victorian Web website. My
teachers touched on the Industrial Revolution as part of our history
classes but for some reason or another they didn't explain how truly
grim those times were." You're most welcome!

Brad Henry writes to point out that "In the opening sentence of your introductory article, 'this' century should of course be 'the last.' A common error among those of a certain age . . . (and of which I am one, so no offence intended)." None taken . . . and thanks. A quite grumpy Denis Green wrote to point out multiple typos in a scanned document — it seems the wrong version might have gone online erasing the proofread one. Michael Wyman writes with corrections to our essay on toy theatres and a citation to Google Books. Nancy Koester, Ph.D., writes to correct information about Annie Field. Thanks to all.

On August 31 theVictorian Web had 41,969 documents.

July 2009

Since both George Landow and Jacqueline Banerjee were on cruise ships during the last week of June — Banerjee on a cruise around the UK and Landow making his way from Nice to Paris by way of the River Rhône from Arles to Avignon, Lyons, and Tournon — little new material went online, but both took many photographs. GPL added a series of 10 photographs of Lyon's gothic revival Basilica de Notre Dame de Fourvière and its sculpture and another six of l'Église Saint-Ambroise in Paris. After finding two fifteenth-century sculptural allusions to Genesis 3:15's "bruising the serpent's head" in Viviers, he added them to the religion section under typology and created a new sitemap for that image so important to Hopkins and Browning. Similarly after coming upon Paul Auscher's 1904 Felix Potin Building on the Rue de Rennes in Paris, he added it to the section on Art Nouveau architecture and then created a new sitemap for it.

On Fiammetta and half a dozen other photographs Ruth M. Landow, a new contributor, used her Photoshop skills to remove distracting backgrounds. Thanks!

Frank M. Turner, the John Hay Whitney Professor of History at Yale and the Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, contributed a long, detailed, and very favorable review of Shanyn Fiske's Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination.
Jessica Courtney contributed "The development of the English language following the Industrial Revolution," which GPL formatted and edited. Thanks to Dr. Catherine Watts, Principal Lecturer, School of Language, Literature and Communication, University of Brighton, for recommending this essay.

Christina Beardsley, whose biography of F. W. Robertson the Lutterworth Press (UK) will publish, offered additional information and a correction that GPL added to our biography of the famous Anglican minister. Thanks!

Dr. Albrecht Geck, Privatdozent at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, wrote for permission to use our scan of Eastlake's drawing of Tom Tower, Oxford, for his book Authority and Faith "on the correspondence between Pusey and Tholuck," which Vandenhöck & Ruprecht in Göttingen will publish this September. Casey Reas of UCLA Design Media Arts writes to request permission to use "your photo of a Jacquard Loom" in FORM + CODE in Design, Architecture, and Art, which Princeton Architectural Press will publish in September.

By the 27th the site had 41,817 documents.

June 2009

After Jacqueline Banerjee sent in a photograph of a London-built hansom cab, pointing out that we had no sitemap for transportation, Landow created one, added his own photo of the York-London mail coach, and created a sitemap entitled "Omnibuses, Coaches, Carriages, and Other Horse-Drawn Vehicles," to which he linked four documents containing passages in which coaches play a significant role from Dickens's Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Bleak House.

Philip Allingham completed most of the task of scanning all 61 plates and related images of Fred Barnard's illustrations of David Copperfield and creating HTML documents for each plate: Allingham scanned all the images, GPL resized, straightened, and otherwise adjusted each image and also created an HTML template, which PVA then filled out. Extensive commentaries come next!

Annette Magid writes to invite papers for her Wilde session at the 2010 Northeast Modern Language Association meeting in Montreal

Eleanor Scoones, Assistant Producer at Silver River (an independent television production company in London making a new 4-part series on the history of the Grand Tour for Channel 4), wrote for — and obtained — permission to use GPL's photograph of the frieze on the Athenaeum Club: "We will be filming at the Parthenon in Greece and whilst there we would like Kevin McCloud to refer to a small black and white print of the photograph as he explains that the AthenaeumÍs frieze was copied from the Parthenon."

Angela Hazelton writes to point out that the url for one of our external links to material about the Great Exhibition had changed. Jennifer Green similarly points out that the link to a Carnegie-Mellon site on feminism no longer works and suggested another instead. Amanda Bierly wrote while I was on the way to Avignon that a typo in Terpening's biography of Richard Strauss gave an incorrect date. Thanks!

Marie O'Brien, Collections Manager of the Saco Museum in Maine kindly provided a photograph of part of H. C. Selous's panorama illustrating Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. John Sankey shared with us a list of Brock's sculpture.

Luca Garuti, who is currently "studying at the University of Verona, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature," kindly e-mailed to point out that the documents for plates 6 & 7 in F. G. Kitton's illustrations of Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drrod had different text but the same image. Thanks!

Pascal Debout of the Institut Charles Darwin International in Metz, Franz, writes to announce a Charles Darwin exhibition at the Park of Bagatelle in Paris from 29 May to the end of October 2009. Simon Cooke, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Henry Courtney Selous, contributed enough material to create an entire section for this important illustrator, including more than a dozen plates, biography, and a series of essays.

Tony Willicombe of Penarth, Wales writes to remind us that Alfred Russel Wallace was a Welsh rather than an English naturalist. Trevor Brock, the minister of Great Victoria Street Baptist Church in Belfast, writes to correct the misidentification of photos of St. Patricks's Roman Catholic Church, and Paisley Mann writes to let correct a date in the DuMairier section. A reader identified only as Ferdi points out a typo in a date. Anne Rawkstar write from Malaysia to correct the Malay names of buildings in Kuala Lumpur. Thanks!

March 2009

The month began with 40, 572 documents on the site and ended with 40851 — these numbers thaks to Aloysius Tay Wee Kwok, IT Manager, University Scholars Programme at National University of Singapore, who kindly configured the main server to send weekly reports. George P. Landow and his students have created an annotated version of Carlyle's "Signs of the Times."

Dr Hilary Grimes wrotes from Edinburgh Napier University to announce a new
Robert Louis Stevenson Website. Deepti Kapoor writes suggesting linking to his site, which contains information of Jewish and Christian notions of passover as context for Rossetti's watercolor of that subject. Evelyn Rosenthal provided photographs of Teulon's St Stephen's Church, and Phil Beauchamp allowed us to use his photographs of George Heywood Sumner's sgraffiti in St Mary's Church, Sunbury.

Philip V. Allingham scanned, partially formatted, and wrote the introduction and captions for both 14 illustrations Harry C. Edwards created for the American publication of Hardy's "Mastr John Horseleigh, Knyght" and the 30 illustrations Harold Copping created for Dickens's works.

Her contributions to the architecture section include a series on Liverpool: The Albert Dock and its Traffic Office (soon to be the home of the International Slavery Museum Research Institute and Education Centre) along with Gladstone's birthplace and other houses in Rodney Street, Liverpool.

Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology at the University of Leeds, sent in his performance of "Ben Bolt," the song Trilby sings in DuMaurier's novel of that name.
Anna Twomey sends in a description of her research on "the culture of working-class autodidacts," asking readers of VW for any suggestions (her e-mail address appears in her project description).

Some time ago Vara Neverow sent along a copy of her Harcourt edtion of Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, which used several of our images.
Julie F. Codell, Professor of Art at Arizona State University, writes to report a batch of bad links that her students encountered in the list of Pre-Raphaelite associates. Thanks!

The month ended with 40,572 documents on site.

January 2009

George P. Landow began the month by sending an updated copy of the site to our mirror at
Nagoya University, Japan, which Professor Mitsu Matsuoka has administered for the past few years. By the 26th 40,026 documents resided on the site.
Some news related to the Victorian Web: After your webmaster decided to take offline its sister site, Postcolonial Literature and Culturewww.postcolonialweb.org, Professor Yew Kong Leong [lyew at nus.edu.sg] volunteered to run the site on servers to which he has access. Those university teachers from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States who kindly wrote when the site disappeared will be very grateful. Thanks Leong!

GPL, prompted by the new section on Gertrude Jekyll (see below), used several of her books, including Old West Surrey (1904), to create long-needed material on housing for the rural working classes ("Cottages and Farmhouses"), rural clothing, including documents with Jekyll's photographs of the countryman's smock, countrywomen's headgear, and pattens, footwear to raise one above the mud. Hannah B. Higgins sends along a copy of her new The Grid Book (MIT Press), which contains GPL's photograph of a Jacquard loom.

Philip Allingham contributes a brief essay to accompany Fred Barnard's Mrs. Gamp, on the Art of Nursing, an illustration to Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, plus commentaries on two illustrations of the same novel by Phiz. He also wrote a detailed discussion of the wrapper for serial issues of David Copperfield, examining how Phiz created his pictorial introduction to a novel about about which the novelist had uncharacteristically told him very little.

Jacqueline Banerjee sent in multiple photographs of Thomas Thornycroft's equestrian statues in Liverpool of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert; John Gibson's Suffer Little Children to Come to Me, Alexander Munro's bust of Josephine Butler accompanied by a biography of this important campaigner for women's rights, and Augustus Welby Pugin's gothic revival hall chair. Continuing her indefatigable proofreading, she caught a number of damaged images, errors, and inconsistencies.

Ray Sachs sent in the latest news on the Crystal Palace Campaign accompanied by both an 1864 plan of the park containing the palace plus a half dozen images of the master plans submitted to Bromley Council's Planning Development Committee. C. Aitchison Hull writes from the UK to notify our readers of her new site on the Victorian painter, Frederick Lee Bridell, and she also shared from her new book about Bridell a passage about the Anglo-American circle in Rome that included the Brownings.
Vince Ciricola writes to let us know that his site to which his essay, "Sadi Carnot and the Conservation of Energy" links, has moved.

Christopher Arnander shared with us material about Gertrude Jekyll from his Jekyll Estate site, which enabled GPL to create a section for this painter, nature writer, and enormously influential garden designer to which which GPL added bibliographies and an essay, "Gertrude Jekyll's Word Painting."